Michelle’s living room was unusual too. It had black walls, with white skirting boards, a large round white-framed mirror and a white fluffy synthetic rug on a black-painted wooden floor. Like his bedroom, it didn’t quite work in Harry’s opinion – he especially hated the ‘kitschy’ rug – but she was clearly interested in creating her own effects, and he appreciated that. There was a photo of a little girl of about six on the mantelpiece: Michelle’s now grown-up daughter, he thought, or maybe a niece, or the child of a friend, given that Michelle seemed to him to be barely old enough to have a daughter who’d left home. Curled up in a large white armchair, and with bare feet – her toenails were also painted glossy black – Michelle was watching a game show he didn’t recognise, but she flipped the TV to silent as soon as he came in.
‘Have you eaten?’ she asked. Lying at her feet, the dog watched him anxiously. ‘There’s a pub just a street away that does okay food, but if you like I can rustle you up a sandwich or something.’
He said he was fine for food but that perhaps he’d go to the pub anyway, have a drink, catch up on some emails and then have an early night.
‘Okay, but you’re very welcome to sit here, if you’d prefer.’ She saw him glance at the screen. ‘I’ll turn that off if you don’t want it. I was just watching it to pass the time. I’d offer you a drink, but I’m not sure I’ve got much in. I’ll go and have a look if you want.’
He thought about the pub, visualized the dull, nearly empty bar of an establishment owned by some large brewery with no more personality than the estate it served, and he imagined spending an hour there doing nothing but sipping at a tepid, sour beer he didn’t really want while flipping without interest through his phone. So why not stay here and chat to Michelle for a bit, he asked himself? He could always turn in early if it became awkward or tedious.
‘Okay, well, if you’re sure. I’ve actually got a bottle of wine in my bag upstairs, if you fancy a glass? Took it with me to the coast but ended up sitting in the pub every night and never got round to drinking it.’
She turned off the TV. Her very slightly lopsided smile was friendly and humorous in spite of its wariness. ‘Yeah, why not?’ she said. ‘That would be nice. I can probably scrape together a bowl of olives or some crisps or something.’
He asked her about herself. Pretty soon, he and Michelle were on to their second glass, and she had told him quite a lot of her early life story. She was thirty-eight. She came originally from Romford in Essex, just outside London, and was the youngest of three: her older sister, Jen, was fifty-two, and her brother Trevor fifty, so there was quite a gap between them and her: ‘My mum refuses to admit it but I was definitely a mistake.’ She was seen as the bright one of the three children, and her father, a bright man who felt he’d missed out on the opportunities that an education would have brought, had wanted her to go to university, but she never went.
‘I was a big disappointment to him, I’m afraid.’
‘Do you regret that now?’
Michelle considered this. ‘Do you know what? I really don’t. This is where I feel at home.’
She and her parents had moved to Breckham when she was fifteen, followed a little later by both her brother and her sister. They’d come to work in the factory of a local company called Kwalpak that made suitcases and bags. It had since closed down. Her father had been a very heavy smoker and had died of lung cancer five years ago but her mother, sister and brother were all still living in Breckham. Michelle had been a worry for her parents when they first moved here. Bitter about having to give up her friends in Romford, she’d been a surly, stubborn teenager, and she’d got involved with drugs and had some scrapes with the law. ‘But that’s in the past now,’ she said, glancing at him with her sly smile, ‘give or take the odd puff now and again.’
She’d trained as a hairdresser and beautician. She and her friend Cheryl – the first friend she’d made when she started at the Breckham comprehensive – rented a small shop just off the high street and called themselves Shear Perfection. Michelle had painted the sign and decorated the place, Cheryl was the businesswoman, always keen to expand the business and offer new services. ‘I could do without the hassle myself,’ was Michelle’s view.
Harry had friends in London who had a similar background to Michelle – people who’d come from small towns, people whose parents were factory workers – but they’d all climbed up out of it and become very similar in tastes and outlook to Harry, though his family had been comfortably middle class for generations. Some of them liked to identify themselves as working class – apart from anything else there was a certain kudos in his circle that came with being able to identify with a disadvantaged group – but they all read the Guardian newspaper, went to art exhibitions and so forth, and were often scathingly dismissive of the worlds from which they’d come. Michelle hadn’t done any of that. In spite of her father’s hopes for her, she’d left school at sixteen and remained in this obscure corner of a county that itself was a byword for provincialism, and claimed to have no regrets about it. Harry couldn’t conceive of how an intelligent and imaginative person could survive in a town like Breckham without becoming dull or bored or bitter, yet this didn’t seem to have happened to her. She talked humorously and with affection about her customers, her family, her neighbours, her dog: Cheryl was so conscious of her appearance that she made herself up each morning ‘as if she was going to be on national TV’ . . . her brother was ‘thick as shit, but thinks he’s God’s gift’ . . . her mum had ‘so many gnomes and crap in her garden, it’s a job to find anywhere to sit down’ . . . Pongo was the world’s worst hunting dog and ‘wouldn’t notice a rabbit if it sat down right in front of his nose’ . . .
Harry liked her. And he liked her sideways way of glancing quickly across at him when she smiled, and the shape her body made when she curled up in her chair, and the way she held her chunky IKEA wine goblet in her small, graceful fingers with their rings and their long black nails. She was a pretty woman, no doubt about that, but, odd though it was to say it about a white English woman in a former council house in a little provincial town, a lot of her appeal to him lay in her exoticism. She was very different from anyone he knew.
‘Anyway, tell me about you!’ she said. ‘I’ve been going on about me for ages!’
He told her he was an architect and lived in London. His father had been a consultant in the Norwich and Norfolk hospital, his mother a professional artist. He’d been to private schools and Cambridge University. His twin sister was a GP.
She was impressed. ‘Christ! I feel embarrassed now. My life must seem pretty boring compared with yours.’
‘Why should you be embarrassed?’ Harry protested. ‘It’s really interesting hearing about your life. Why wouldn’t it be?’ and then, more tentatively: ‘I notice you speak about your mum and your siblings, but you don’t speak about a family of your own . . . ?’
‘Yeah, well.’ She chewed at her left forefinger. ‘That side of my life is a fucking disaster, to be honest.’
‘Ha. Same. But don’t feel you have to talk about it if you’d rather not.’
She shrugged, offered him more wine, filled up their glasses. ‘I’ll tell you if you want to hear.’
She’d married at eighteen a man she referred to as Fudge, who was seven years older than her and a heavy user of cannabis. He’d rarely been in work, was serially unfaithful, and sometimes hit her. She’d left him when she was twenty-three. After a couple of other relationships, she’d met her second husband, Mick, when she was twenty-seven. He was the assistant manager of the local Tesco supermarket at the time, and was now the manager. They’d had a daughter, Caitlin – Michelle pointed to the photo on the mantelpiece – but four years ago, when Caitlin was six, she’d lost control of her tricycle when Michelle was walking her back from school, swerving on to a road to be crushed by a passing truck and killed instantly. She and Mick had been unable to cope with the aftermath of that together, and after two miserab
le years they’d split up.
In the course of telling Harry about this, Michelle had knocked back another glass and a half of wine, and there was now none left in the bottle. ‘I could use another drink,’ she said before he could comment further on her story. ‘You too? I might have a bottle somewhere. Let me go and have a look.’ She went out and clattered noisily about in the kitchen. Pongo lumbered stiffly to the door and waited there for her. Harry walked over to look at the little girl on the mantelpiece.
‘It happened to me too,’ he told her when she came back in. ‘I lost my only child, my little boy Danny. And my wife and I have not long split up, just like you and Mick did.’
‘Oh, no way!’ She put the bottle she’d found on the small side table between the chairs and the TV and came to stand beside him, touching his arm. Pongo the dog came over to them, awkwardly, as if he imagined that something was expected of him but didn’t know what, and then lay down again. ‘You should have said, before I went on and on about Caitlin!’
He looked down into her raw, grey eyes, then back at the photo on the mantelpiece. ‘It feels impossible to bear, doesn’t it? A lovely cheerful little person, full of optimism, full of enthusiasm for life, and then . . . ’
‘Don’t!’ she begged. ‘Don’t!’ And suddenly she put her arms round him and hugged him against her, seeking comfort, perhaps, but more than anything trying to stop him speaking.
They stood like that for a few seconds. And then, without speaking, she stepped back from him to open the second bottle of wine and fill their glasses.
They drank all of that second bottle and talked for another hour about what it was to lose a child. The very same calamity that had broken up both of their marriages had the opposite effect of making the two of them feel close. They talked about the sheer physical weight of grief pressing down on them and the way that, even now, they still found themselves rehearsing every day the things they could have done to prevent the blow from falling. When Caitlin swerved on to the road, Michelle had been distracted for a few seconds by a text from her sister, just long enough for the little girl to be beyond her reach by the time she realized what was happening. She’d never dared to admit this to Caitlin’s father. In fact, she said she’d never admitted it to anyone at all until now, the worst part being that the text hadn’t been urgent in the least. She could have left it to reply to later – it would have made no difference to her sister – and, if she had done, Caitlin would still be alive.
The dog wandered through to the kitchen and began to whine and bark, so Michelle went to let it out into the garden. ‘I’ll tell you the truth,’ she said when she came back. ‘I didn’t notice my little girl was getting too far away from me because I was looking at my stupid fucking phone and trying to decide whether I wanted to go to the pictures with my sister on Saturday.’
They were both silent for a few seconds. ‘Well, I failed to notice my son was dangerously ill,’ Harry said, ‘because I was more interested in how pissed off I was with my wife than I was in wondering whether my child had meningitis. All I had to do to save him was set my annoyance on one side, just for a few minutes, and look at him, really look at him, without thinking about anything else but how he was. And the stupidest thing about it was that we were going to have a sleepless night anyway, with Janet fretting and worrying, so we might just as well have taken him to the hospital.’
Michelle nodded. ‘You might as well have done, but you didn’t. I go over and over it. It’s like some dumb part of me thinks that, if I think hard enough about what I could have done differently, I’ll be able to put the clock back and actually do it. Every fucking day I think about that text coming through, and I think about how all I need to do is leave it to look at later when we’re safely home, and I’m actually thinking to myself, “Yeah, I’ll just wait till I get home”, when I remember it’s too late now. I did look at that stupid text. It’s done and I can’t take it back. It makes no difference what I’d do about it if I had my time again. I’ve had my chance, and now my baby’s gone.’
‘But of course that’s unbearable,’ Harry said, ‘so off you go again, thinking about what you could do to prevent it, and half-persuading yourself that you still really can. And so on and so on, round and round, for days and weeks and months.’
‘And years,’ she said.
‘Yes, and years.’
In one of his many reflections on that evening, Harry observes that intimacy between two people doesn’t just come from being alike. ‘If I could be cloned,’ he writes, ‘and could meet an exact copy of me who shared every memory and every feeling that I had ever had, that wouldn’t feel like intimacy. I can’t imagine what it would be like but it would be another thing entirely. Intimacy comes from being quite obviously different from another person and yet still finding a point of contact.’
Eventually Harry looked at his watch and said he ought to get to bed. He needed to sort his car out as early as possible, and then get back up to London for a meeting with his two partners about his involvement with the firm in the longer term. He stood up.
‘It’s been lovely talking to you,’ he told Michelle quite truthfully, ‘and you wouldn’t believe how much nicer this evening has been than I imagined when I found out I wasn’t going to be able to drive home. Much nicer than it would have been if I had got home, come to that.’
She stood up too. She came towards him, touched his arm for a moment, and then seemed to make a sudden decision because she took hold of both his arms and reached up to very lightly kiss him on the mouth. It was completely unexpected and the electric sweetness of it was extraordinarily intense. ‘It was a lovely evening,’ she said.
She still hadn’t let go of him. ‘Listen,’ she said after a moment, ‘I promise you I’ve never even thought about saying this to any of my guests before, but . . . I mean, it’s probably a stupid thing to say, but we’re both single, aren’t we, and . . . well, do you want to . . . ?’
Seeing him flinch, she instantly went on the defensive. ‘Oh shit, I’m an idiot. Ignore me. I’ve had too much wine. Just forget I said it, eh?’
She’d let go of him but he took her by the hands. ‘No, please don’t be embarrassed. It’s a lovely offer and I’m very flattered, but do you really think it’s a good idea? I mean, we’ve both drunk a fair amount. Don’t you think you’d regret it in the morning?’
She examined his face. ‘If you want an honest answer to that, no, I won’t regret it. Not as long as you won’t. I want us to have sex, Harry, if you would like that.’
‘I do too, to be honest. I want it very much indeed. But it’s important we both . . . ’
There was a momentary flash of anger in her eyes. ‘Important that we both know there are no strings attached? Of course. You come from a completely different world to me. Of course I don’t think it’s going to lead to anything. I just think it would be . . . well, comforting.’ She laughed. ‘I’d certainly sleep better, anyway.’
He managed to fight a silly and dishonest impulse to reassure her that coming from different worlds had nothing to do with it. ‘Well . . . if you’re sure, I’d love that.’
So they kissed again, more slowly. He was already very aroused.
‘To be honest,’ he said, ‘it’s a very long time since I slept with anyone. You’ll have to forgive me if I’m a little—’
She interrupted him with a laugh. ‘It’s a long time since I’ve slept with anyone who wasn’t a total arsehole.’
*
Obviously Harry didn’t write a diary that night but he makes several attempts later to describe how it had felt when he and Michelle lay down together. ‘Sex is hard to write about,’ he concludes. ‘It’s partly a kind of prudery that holds me back, I suppose, but the main problem is that the right words just don’t seem to exist. One set of words sounds like porn, the other like a medical textbook, and there’s nothing in between. I mean, for instance, there isn’t a way of describing the moment she took me inside her that feels like I’m
saying what I actually want to say, and that includes the words I’ve just written, which sound sort of coy and cringey.’
He gives up trying and speaks in general terms: ‘But kissing, touching . . . Such implausibly delicious pleasure. Such heaven. Being naked with another person who wants to be touched and wants to touch, and doesn’t say no, doesn’t say stop, but instead keeps saying yes, that too . . . yes, of course, as much as you want, I want it every bit as much as you.’
There were moments of doubt even at the time, though. He worried that when they’d spent themselves, all of this sweetness would prove to be just a surface that covered something rather pathetic and desperate. Perhaps he’d feel guilty then, or ashamed, or horribly embarrassed? Perhaps he’d realize that he didn’t like her? But he told himself no, he did like her, and there was no pretence here, no possible misunderstanding on either side that this was the beginning of something, or was anything more than the moment itself.
And actually, he didn’t just feel he liked her. He experienced something that felt to him like love, and it overwhelmed him. He found himself whispering endearments to her: sweetheart, darling, beautiful, precious. ‘I knew I shouldn’t,’ he writes later. ‘Even at the time I knew I shouldn’t. But I couldn’t seem to help myself because she was giving me so much pleasure, so much happiness.’
People make rules about love. They say it only counts as real love when this or that has happened, or in this or that context, but it seemed to Harry in that moment that love didn’t really work that way at all. Love was just a thing that we had inside ourselves, a natural force that allowed us to reach beyond the loneliness of our own heads. And sometimes we held it in, or couldn’t quite reach it, or lost sight of it altogether, while at other times it came rushing up in such abundance that we almost had no choice but to let it out.
‘Are you okay?’ he asked when they’d both come and were lying side by side.
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