You Can’t Fall in Love With Your Ex (Can You?) (15 page)

“Thank
you for having me,” muttered Delphine, and I closed the door behind them.

“Thank
God that’s over,” I said.

“Mummy,
can Felix stay and watch me open my presents?” Darcey said. “And do some more
magic? Please?”

“No
more magic,” I said. “And no presents until we’ve tidied up a bit, okay? I’m
sure Felix would love to see your presents, but I expect he’s got other things
to do.”

“I
don’t mind,” Felix said. “I can stay for a bit.”

So
he did, helping to sort out the wreckage of the kitchen, which had plates of
congealing cocktail sausages everywhere, crisps trodden into the floor,
countless half-drunk cups of squash on every surface, the plundered remains of
the birthday cake, and, inexplicably, a pair of fairy wings draped over the
back of a chair. We watched Darcey rip the paper off her stack of birthday
presents, then he showed her some more magic tricks while I put Owen to bed.
When eventually I’d tucked Darcey up and watched as she almost instantly fell
asleep, I came downstairs to find him waiting with a bottle of wine and two
glasses.

“I
hope you don’t mind,” he said. “I thought you looked like you needed a drink,
and I know I do.”

“Damn
right I do.” I sank down onto the floor, my back against the sofa, and Felix
joined me. It was how we used to sit, I remembered, our legs stretched out in
front of us, our hands intertwined, while Mel and Roddy sprawled above us on
the shabby leather couch in our flat in Covent Garden, all those years ago.
Felix handed me a glass of wine and smiled, and I knew he was remembering,
too.

I
felt suddenly shy again, although while the kids had been around and we’d been
busy with the mundane post-party chores, I’d felt completely comfortable,
answering his questions about whether things went in the dishwasher and where I
kept the cling-film as if he was just another friend. But he wasn’t, I realised
– he was my ex, the man who’d broken my heart, who I’d believed for years was
The One, The Only One, the One Who Got Away – even though that wasn’t true,
that was how it felt. And here he was sitting in my house, close enough to
touch, while my husband was out. I tucked my knees up and wrapped my arms
around them, then realised that made my skirt slip down my bare thighs, so I
straightened them again.

“So,”
I said. “You haven’t told me what you’ve been up to, all these years.”

“You
haven’t told me, either,” he said.

“Yes,
but,” I gestured at the room around me, up to the ceiling above which my
children were sleeping. “You know. You’ve seen. It’s all here. I don’t know
anything about you.”

“You’ve
seen where I am now, too,” Felix said. “I stayed in Russia until I stopped
dancing. I was still okay, but I was getting slower, taking longer to recover –
you know. So I tried acting. Turns out I’m good at it – good enough to be in
work some of the time, anyway. When I’m not I do other stuff.”

“Like
what?”

“Magic
shows for kids, obviously,” he laughed. “No, I don’t do that much. I work in a
bar sometimes – a mate of mine has a place in Hoxton and I help out there when
it’s busy. I mix a mean Blood and Sand. And I train doctors.”

“You
what?”

“Train
doctors. Well, not myself. But when they’re learning to have a bedside manner,
they use actors. You know – ‘Mr Lawson, I’m afraid there’s nothing more we can
do for your wife.’ ‘Mr Lawson, you’ll need six-monthly prostate checks for the
rest of your life.’ That kind of thing. It’s not exactly a laugh a minute, but
it pays the bills when nothing else does. I work with a woman in Brixton who
does theatre workshops with young offenders – they’re almost as scary as kids’
parties. I was in the States for a bit. I had a part on Broadway but the show
bombed, so I came back here.”

“Where
are you living?” I asked – the typical London question that lets you find out
almost everything you need to know about a person’s life by their postcode. But
Felix was unforthcoming.

“A
hotel, for the time being,” he said. “While I’m doing
Dream
. And after
that —” he shrugged – “I’ll go wherever there’s work. Chasing after my big
break. I live in hope, anyway.”

“But…”
I said again, then stopped, and topped up our glasses. The closeness, the
intimacy I’d felt when we first sat down together was gone. I was conscious of
the huge gulf that had opened up between us – how different our lives were, our
aspirations. Not, I realised, that I really had any aspirations any more,
beyond my children’s happiness and safety. And losing half a stone, obviously.

“Laura,
there’s nothing wrong with this, you know. What you have. It’s wonderful.”

Anyone
else would have thought that I felt sorry for Felix when he told me what his
life was like, but he knew me too well. He’d realised I was worried that he
pitied me.

“It
is,” I said, defensively. “Anyway, I couldn’t have carried on. You know that.”

“I
do,” he said, and reached over, almost putting his hand on my bare knee, then
withdrawing it. “I was married, you know.”

I
felt a sharp, unexpected stab of jealousy. He what? When I’d imagined what
Felix was doing in the years since we last saw each other, that had somehow not
crossed my mind. Sometimes, I’d tortured myself by imagining him on the red
carpet with a succession of glamorous, A-list women on his arm – sometimes so
vividly that I’d been too frightened to look at the
Daily Mail
sidebar
of shame lest he appear there in a dinner jacket next to a beautiful model in
Valentino. But mostly, I’d preferred to imagine him single, alone and lonely,
success eluding him as he lost his looks and became a fat, disappointed shadow
of himself. The second scenario was pretty accurate, I realised – apart from
the minor details of Felix being as gorgeous as he’d ever been and, apparently,
not disappointed in the slightest.

“She
was a dancer,” he said. “Of course. Tatiana, I mean. We met not long after…
about twelve years ago. But then she decided she wanted a family, and there was
just no way I could do that. I couldn’t jack in my career for two kids and a
picket fence and I wasn’t earning enough to let her jack hers in and try and do
something else. So that went tits up. And now she’s married to an accountant
and living in Omsk.”

Maddeningly,
he didn’t even sound particularly disappointed about that.

“Funny
how history repeats itself,” I said, cattily.

“Hilarious,”
Felix said.

I
tipped more wine into our glasses. The bottle was nearly finished.

“He’s
an accountant, then, your ‘hubby’?” I could hear the careful quotes he put
around the word.

“A
management consultant,” I said. “He’s just been made a partner in the firm
where he works. And I’m not working. I was, but I got laid off.”

I
knew how prickly I sounded. Jonathan’s success, and my lack of it, was
something I avoided thinking about.

“What
does a management consultant do, then?” Felix said, steering the conversation
on to safer territory.

“I’m
not exactly sure,” I admitted. “Jonathan said when I met him that the
definition of a consultant is a guy who knows ninety-nine positions to have sex
in, and no women.”

“And
does he?” Felix said. He was looking at me sideways, from beneath his
impossibly long eyelashes, and his gaze and his words reminded me of all the
times we’d fucked, all the positions we’d done it in, all the places.

“He
knows me,” I said, deliberately misunderstanding. “His boss is a woman, actually.
Things have changed. There’s lots more equality now, Jonathan says.”

“Is
there,” Felix said. It wasn’t a question. He stretched his arms up over his
head, pulling the silk shirt out from the waistband of his trousers, and yawned
hugely. Fuck, I thought, I was boring him. I’d changed too much, we no longer
had anything in common, and now he was going to go home, and tomorrow he’d tell
all his mates at work about his adventure in middle-class Wandsworth, and laugh
about how conventional, dull and shallow his ex-girlfriend, who used to have a
brilliant career as a ballerina, had become.

And
then I thought, rightly so. Let him fuck off and live his life, hoping that his
big break is just around the corner, even when it’s not. Good luck to him. I’ve
succeeded in my life – he blatantly hasn’t. He’s a failure, even if he’s the
most beautiful failure I’ve ever seen.

Then
Felix said, “Laura, I’ve wanted to say sorry for fifteen years. For what
happened. I tried to tell you then, but you wouldn’t let me. And then I was in
Russia – there was no Facebook then, it was harder to find people. I tried,
once I was back in London. But you were married by then and I couldn’t find
you. And even if I had…”

He
stopped, but I knew what he’d been about to say. It would have been too late.
And now he had, and it was.

“I
know,” I said. “I’m sorry, too. It wasn’t your fault. It felt like it then, but
I know it wasn’t, really. I’ve grown up, I guess.”

I
didn’t tell him that I’d had very little difficulty tracking him down – that
his name had been almost the first I’d looked for when I opened my Facebook
account, and Googling him had become as tempting as picking a scab.

He
reached over and took my hand, and we sat there for a moment, feeling the warm
pressure of each other’s fingers, remembering.

Then
I stood up, pleased that I was still able to uncurl myself from the floor
without using my hands. I meant to say – I genuinely did – that it was almost
eight o’clock, and he should go, but what came out was, “Shall I open another
bottle?”

Felix
said, “Only if you put some music on.”

Half
an hour later, we were dancing around my sitting room like lunatics, the music
quiet enough not to wake the children, but loud enough to drown out our
tuneless attempts to sing along. I discovered that although my mind didn’t
remember the way I’d moved back when I still could, my body did. And Felix’s
did too. It was late, far too late, when we collapsed on the sofa in a laughing
heap, our acrimony forgotten and the second bottle of wine history.

“Laura,”
Felix said.

“What?”
I said, gasping for breath, and we both started to laugh again.

“Look,
I need to go,” he said. “And you need me to go. But I want to see you again.
Not in a – not like that. But you liked the play, didn’t you?”

“The
play?” I’d forgotten all about it. “Yes, I did. I loved it.”

“I
can get comps. If I send you some, will you come? Maybe we could have a drink
in the bar after.”

“I’d
love that,” I said. “Thank you.” Then I offered to ring a taxi for him, and
said I’d pay for it, and we were able to say goodbye, kissing each other on the
cheek at the front door like old friends, because we knew we were going to see
each other again.

I
may have fallen asleep quickly, but my sleep wasn’t deep, or restful. All night,
it seemed, I dreamed strange, anxious dreams, in which I was on my way to
rehearsal but couldn’t find the right studio, and when eventually I did I’d
forgotten my shoes, and then when I rushed off to find them, the rehearsal room
had moved again, and suddenly I was out in the street with no clothes on, and
people were laughing at me.

It
was laughter that woke me fully. Felix was sitting up in bed next to me, his
eyes bleary and his hair tousled, and Roddy was in the doorway with two mugs of
coffee.

“What’s
this then?” he said. “Sleeping Beauty, the Porn Star Years?”

“Fuck
off, Roderigo,” Felix said. “I can assure you that your flatmate’s virtue is
unsullied – by me, at any rate. Unless I was too pissed to remember, but I
don’t think so. Was I, Laura?”

“You
must have been pretty pissed,” I said, sitting up too. “Or do you make a habit
of passing out in girls’ beds?”

“I’ve
been known to,” Felix said. “But generally only once I’ve driven them to
extremes of ecstasy, and I’d have remembered doing that to you. Wouldn’t I?”

“No
extremes of ecstasy here,” I said. “You were rubbish, to be honest.”

Felix’s
face fell, then he realised I was taking the piss out of him. “Hand me a
coffee, Roderigo,” he said. “I feel like utter shite.”

“What
time is it, anyway?” I asked. “We haven’t missed class, have we?”

“It’s
only seven thirty,” Roddy said. “Melodrama hasn’t surfaced yet.”

That
was unlike Mel, who was usually up at six on work days, doing her Pilates in
the living room. 

“I’ll
go and see if she’s okay,” I said. I clambered out of bed, shy in front of
Felix in the T-shirt I’d slept in, which barely covered my bottom. I wasn’t
wearing anything underneath. I hoped I hadn’t snored. This was the moment I’d
longed for – waking up next to Felix – but it wasn’t happening at all as I’d
imagined.

“I’ll
take this to Mel,” I said, grabbing one of the cups of coffee from Roddy.

“Here,
you have this one.” He handed the other to Felix. “Your need’s greater than
mine, Lawsonski. I’ll stick the kettle on again. Breakfast will be served in
ten minutes, so make yourself decent. This is a respectable establishment, not
one of your Moscow bordelloes.”