How I Lose You

by Kate McNaughton

  So why is Carmen on the outer reaches? Why is Georgie at the centre?

  ‘Do you remember the first time we met Georgie?’

  ‘Hm? I don’t know. When was the first time we met her?’

  ‘Seriously? You don’t remember? It was that evening we were meant to be going to the Ivy …’

  ‘We’ve never been to the Ivy, have we?’

  ‘No, precisely. We didn’t go. Henry had messed up the reservation somehow – I think he’d booked it for a different month or something. We ended up just going for a curry instead.’

  ‘Oh, hang on, yes, this is ringing bells …’

  ‘I can’t believe I’m having to remind you of this! It was meant to be, like, our big introduction to Henry’s new girlfriend.’

  ‘Yeah, no, I can remember us standing outside the Ivy and trying to decide where to go instead …’

  ‘And Georgie was so angry. That was my very first impression of her. So pissed off with Henry for having got the booking mixed up. And he was being so – so meek, so conciliatory. I was really shocked. That she would be so mean to him, in front of his best friends. And then she was so snooty about us going for a curry instead.’

  ‘Well, she was probably really nervous about meeting us all. You know what she’s like – it will have been really important to her for our first evening together to be in a fancy restaurant. She was probably just thrown by everything not going to plan.’

  ‘But that was also what I found so weird about her – I was like, if you love Henry, surely you can’t get upset about something like that? Booking for the wrong month is such a quintessentially Henry thing to do …’

  ‘Ha ha, that’s very true …’

  ‘She felt like such an intrusion. I was like, if you weren’t here, the four of us would just happily go for a curry together, not have to spend hundreds of pounds on dinner, and that would be that.’

  ‘Well, that was probably why she was so nervous – she could probably tell that you thought she was intruding.’

  ‘She gave me this look at the beginning, when it was becoming clear what had gone wrong – like she was trying to get me to join her in being angry with Henry. A kind of “We’re both women having to put up with these idiotic men” kind of look. She was probably pissed off I didn’t back her up.’

  ‘You’re sure you didn’t give her an “I am Eva having to put up with an idiotic Georgie” kind of look?’

  ‘Hmph.’

  They fall silent as their table fills, and the starters arrive: foie gras poêlé for well over two hundred guests. There was a time, not so long ago, when their dinners were just pasta with bacon and tomato sauce and Cheddar cheese grated on top, and sitting on the floor and cutlery that didn’t match. They blame it on Georgie, that everything has turned into a performance, but the fact is they’re all slowly accumulating table sets and heavy cookbooks, and talking about mortgages instead of love, meaning, the fire in their bellies.

  Eventually, Eva falls into conversation with the man next to her – Bertie? – and he turns out to be a nice enough fellow, a bit shy and stammery, but surprisingly knowledgeable about the history of the Middle East: he fell in love with archaeology as a boy, on a school trip to Petra, would have loved to become an archaeologist, in fact, but what can you do, there’s absolutely no money in it. But he still goes on digs when he can, and charts with concern the destruction of various precious finds through conflict or natural disaster, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the mountains of Afghanistan. It is a sorry world we live in, when the last traces of ancient civilizations can be destroyed before our very eyes.

  The guy sitting opposite them overhears their conversation.

  ‘Did I hear you say you’d been to Iraq?’

  ‘Oh. Yes. I’ve just got back, in fact.’

  ‘Ah, well you need to tell old Eddie here all about it.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Eddie!’

  The Eddie in question – smooth, amiable – turns towards them.

  ‘Hm?’

  ‘This young lady here – I’m sorry, what was your name?’

  ‘Eva. Young man.’

  ‘Eva here has just returned from a tour of duty in Iraq.’

  ‘Oh – you’re in the army?’

  ‘God, no! I’m a journalist.’

  ‘Maybe she can report back on how your investments are doing, Eddie-o.’

  ‘Investments?’

  ‘Oh, I work for a fund that invests in the security industry. Benno here is being a little facetious.’

  ‘Security, huh? Which fund?’

  ‘Oh, you probably won’t have heard of us, we’re a very small outfit.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘We’re called Coutts Withers Jones.’

  ‘So by security you mean arms manufacturers.’

  ‘Well – among other things, yes.’

  ‘Well then, I can report back that your investments do an excellent job of pulverizing twelve-year-old boys at fifty feet.’

  ‘Hey, steady on.’

  ‘Riiiiiiiiight … Moving on swiftly …’

  Eddie, who hasn’t reacted while everyone around him tries frantically to pedal the conversation back to safer waters, holds Eva in a level gaze.

  ‘It’s hardly that simple, you know.’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  Then Henry and Georgina appear at their sides, and all eyes turn jovially to the married couple. Henry is beaming, his chest as puffed as a peacock’s.

  ‘Everyone happy here?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely, old chap.’

  Georgina smiles absently at them, like a queen with affairs of state on her mind, and scans the room with eagle eyes. Behind them, Eva catches a glimpse of both of their sets of parents, deep in conversation, the fathers nodding seriously at each other, the mothers tapping one another’s arms affectionately with their long, immaculate nails.

  Henry and Georgina are off again, Georgie having signalled with the most discreet of nods that there is something they need to attend to on the other side of the room, and Henry having immediately picked up on it, playing his role to perfection. The rest of the table falls back into chatter, carefully avoiding Eva and her talk of pulverized children, so that she is free to just speak to Adam instead.

  ‘Well, you rattled them a bit.’

  ‘What was I supposed to say? That guy’s the one who brought the subject up. I mean, I’ve just come back from Iraq, what the hell do they think is going on out there?’

  ‘Yeah. I know.’

  ‘Anyway. Let’s not talk about it now.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  They watch the bridal pair make their way through the many tables, clinking glasses and exchanging pleasantries. Eva tries to pull her mind back to the present occasion.

  ‘He’s really in his element, isn’t he? Henry, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah. So’s Georgie.’

  ‘Well, apart from the fact there’s enough tension coming off her to power the National Grid for the evening.’

  ‘Ha ha – that’s true. But she’s loving it, Eve, look at her. This is her thing, being the host of an enormous party. She’s loving the tension.’

  ‘And the attention.’

  ‘Isn’t that the whole point of getting married?’

  ‘What, so you can get some attention?’

  ‘So you can be the centre of attention.’

  ‘I thought it was about declaring your love for one another.’

  ‘Well, that too. And look at them – they’re quite cute together, really.’

  ‘Hm.’

  ‘It – it makes sense, doesn’t it? For Henry. He’s – I don’t know. He’s marrying into his kind.’

  ‘That’s weird – that’s exactly what I was thinking. I was looking at his parents and Georgie’s just now and thinking, they’re all the same.’

  ‘His tribe.’

  ‘Yes. Maybe none of us realized that Henry
had a tribe. That this is where he belongs.’

  ‘Yes. It’s weird, isn’t it? It all just seems to make sense. Like everything is in its place. In a way that I don’t think the same event with Henry and Carmen would have made sense.’

  ‘Really? Do you really think that?’

  ‘Sort of. I mean – I don’t know. Who knows. I’d probably be saying the exact opposite if we were watching Henry and Carmen get married.’

  ‘Adam, I think you maybe need to stop talking about a putative marriage between Henry and Carmen. I’m worried you’ll get everyone mixed up in your speech.’

  ‘Oh God! My speech. I’d actually managed to forget to stress about it!’

  ‘Sorry …’

  ‘No, it’s good you’ve reminded me. I should really nip out and have a last-minute practice, if that’s OK? Will you be all right on your own with the arms dealers for a bit?’

  ‘I’ll be fine.’

  Adam slips away, and Eva finds her gaze drifting over to Carmen, who is talking animatedly to the guy sitting next to her. There is a slight mania to her gestures, an abruptness to them, that makes Eva tense with worry, but then she notices something about the position of the guy talking to Carmen, how he is leaning in towards her, and she realizes that actually this animation probably doesn’t seem frantic to him, it probably just seems attractive. And there is something magnetic about Carmen right now, the elegant curve of her neck as she cocks her head to listen to him speak, the wide open flash of her smile, and it’s true what Adam said, you can’t really imagine her being up there in Georgie’s place, marshalling events according to some carefully laid-out life plan, because Carmen is too – she’s too free, that’s what it is, her supple gestures, her quick eyes, there is too much freedom in there.

  She notices Eva looking at her, and comes over.

  ‘Nice-looking guy you were chatting to there.’

  ‘Oh, he’s actually surprisingly interesting. I mean – for a friend of Georgie’s. Or sort of friend; actually I think he’s just a colleague. Which maybe explains why he’s not unbearable, if she doesn’t know him that well.’

  ‘She probably befriended him specifically so she could seat him next to you at this dinner. Say what you will about Georgie, I think she’d actually be a pretty good matchmaker.’

  ‘Yes, she’s got that slightly maniacal matronly thing going on, hasn’t she?’

  ‘I was talking to Adam earlier about the first time we met her, do you remember?’

  ‘Oh Jesus – the Great Ivy Fuck-Up? How could I forget? She was such a dick to Henry. Whoops. Probably shouldn’t have said that quite that loud …’

  ‘Yeah, no, she was though.’

  ‘But it’s weird, I’ve been thinking this evening – it’s so weird, it’s like – these are his people …’

  ‘Ha! That’s exactly what Adam and I were saying. That it’s like this is Henry’s tribe. How he looks like he – I don’t know, like he belongs.’

  ‘So – maybe Georgie’s not so bad after all.’

  ‘I just – it’s so weird that we’re not all at a table together. The four of us. That you’ve been relegated all the way out there.’

  ‘Ach, come on, Eve – it’s not that bad. I’m used to it.’

  ‘Used to what?’

  ‘Being on the outside looking in.’

  ‘Now you’re just being melodramatic.’

  ‘OK, maybe I am a bit. But anyway. At least I got to chat to an eligible bachelor. Your table seems a bit duff, huh?’

  ‘Oh no, there’s a couple of nice enough people. I just managed to alienate everyone by giving an honest response to a question about what life is like in Iraq these days.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yeah. Turns out it’s not acceptable material for a wedding reception.’

  ‘Was it that bad?’

  ‘What, Iraq or my faux pas? Well, both were, to be honest …’

  ‘I meant Iraq, you ninny. You have that distant look on your face where I can tell you’ve seen something horrible.’

  ‘No, there … there was this kid. In a village we went through – just a kid, twelve or something – anyway we were just driving through and stopped off to buy something to drink, and he was helping out in this little shop. Just a nice kid, trying to persuade us to take him with us back to the UK, told us he supported Arsenal … And later on we drove back through the village and the shop was just rubble, and all that was left of him was half a leg, I recognized it because it still had his shoe on it, I’d noticed the shoes when we were talking to him, they were kind of swanky, I’d wondered where he’d got such nice shoes from …’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Yeah. Sorry – I shouldn’t be bringing this stuff up now.’

  ‘No, Jesus. I mean, you’ve only just got back …’

  ‘It’s just – somehow this one has affected me more than things like this usually do. I normally manage to keep this – I don’t know – self-preserving distance, I suppose you might call it. Even on 9/11 – it was like there was this internal switch inside of me that flipped and gave me this weird … detachment, I suppose. I remember being freaked out by it, but also thinking this is what is making me able to look at all this, and it’s important for someone to look and tell everyone else what’s going on.

  ‘…’

  ‘But with this kid … suddenly it just seems so pointless. Who’s going to take an interest in one more dead boy in Iraq? There’s nothing left but the fact that it’s awful – an awful death of a sweet, perfectly normal boy.’

  ‘Yes. It is awful.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t be talking about this on Henry’s big day. And I’m fine, really. It’s just … that poor kid.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘…’

  ‘…’

  Then Adam is walking up to the mic, and though Eva can tell that he is nervous, he does an excellent job of the speech, pitching it at exactly the right level of innuendo to make the whole room chuckle, hinting at grittier details for those in the know, but also delivering, at the end, a genuinely heartfelt tribute to Henry and Georgina, and to their love for each other. Carmen and she both have a tear in their eye by the end of it, and they smile at each other, and indeed it does feel like everything is as it should be, like everyone is in their place, and Eva smiles at Adam as he returns to his place by her side, and feels the reassuring weight of his hand stroking her back, and though she cannot quite stop thinking of the boy and his shoe, she feels too that this is where she belongs, this is her luck, and she manages to feel grateful for it.

  YOU THINK OF the pale faces of the dead, the numerous dead from so many ages, pushing out of sandstone in church crypts or flaking away in the pale paint of a mural, and of the arrogance of the living who look at them and think how quaint, they knew nothing of penicillin or the workings of an aeroplane.

  And how Adam has joined their ranks now, how already your present would be unrecognizable to him, plummeting stock markets and yet on the other hand the new hopefulness of Yes We Can, and you in the midst of this, strangely detached, browbeaten by grief, looking at his smiling blue eyes in a photograph and seeing in them only their ignorance of what is to come, of the knowledge that is now your burden.

  And yet you also wonder what knowledge those eyes hold that you yourself are ignorant of, just like the angular figures of an Egyptian fresco hide within them the secret of how the pyramids were built, and it seems to you that the dead, and Adam, are another people entirely, at once innocent and knowing, as opposed to the living, who are knowing and innocent.

  There is a tree outside your window, with browning, yellow, atrophied leaves, and when the wind blows they tumble in a dry pitter-patter reminiscent of rainfall, and you think this might be the sound that the dead make as their souls touch lightly on the earth and become one with it again, turning their backs on the progress of temporal events, taking their secrets with them. It is as sad as the s
ight of those leaves lying on the ground, still golden for now, but already starting to dissolve into a mushy decay.

  EVA SIGHED AS, for the third time in the past half-hour, she tried to put something into the pouch on the seat in front of her, only to find that there wasn’t one there. Bloody Ryanair.

  She rearranged her travel gear on the tiny tray in front of her: a giant, milky coffee, an empty bottle of San Pellegrino, a blister pack of Nurofen, a pointless book – she had lost the ability to read since Adam died. Lost the ability to read, but not, oddly, the compulsion to buy books. It would catch her out when she was on autopilot, like today in the Stansted WHSmith, the old thrum of excitement at the pristine covers, the promise of stories and secrets and revelations within – but now, whenever she sat down and tried to focus her mind on actual words on a page, that terrible night was all her imagination could escape to. Adam’s story had eclipsed all others.

  If only she had somewhere she could put that bloody book. It was good to focus on small irritations. They were like a mosquito bite distracting you from the cancer that was eating you up inside. This plane was like a skin around her, covered in mosquito bites – the non-existent pouches, the way your knees rubbed into the seat in front of you, the incessant announcements on the tannoy, the cheap nylon of the air hostesses’ blouses – and she the tumour within, dark and festering.

  A steward passed and whisked away her empty bottle, imperious, not deigning to ask for her permission, nor acknowledging the invasive brush of his hand against hers. Close on his heels, a second steward pushing a refreshment trolley tried to hustle a drink at her. They smiled so sweetly when they wanted to sell you something. Her throat was tickling, but she didn’t want to give Ryanair any more money, so she sent him on his way. She was going to Berlin, cramped, thirsty, a mild, modern-day martyr. In other ages, there would have been more dignity to a trip like this, this pilgrimage of a widow in her husband’s footsteps: she should have been a wealthy heiress with a stately entourage and three extra carriages to carry her library, or a peasant woman making the epic journey by foot, using her last few pennies on the crossing from Dover and then begging her way across the continent. The modern experience was so cheap, with its creaking plastic seats and canned air filled with coffee breath.