The Place We Met

by Isabelle Broom

  ‘Talk to me,’ I urge Pete, taking his hand and leading him slowly across the grass. There’s a flower bed full of white winter roses ahead of us, glowing mutely in the darkness.

  He takes a deep breath.

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything,’ I say. ‘Start at the beginning.’

  We’re far enough down the curve of the hill now to see the lake. At this time of night, with just the moon for company, it looks like a vast swathe of ebony satin. The iconic mountains that sit so boldly on the horizon during daylight hours are shrouded now under the cloak of night, and the dark sweep of sky feels limitless.

  ‘Taggie was always vigilant when it came to taking her pill,’ Pete says at last, sounding regretful. ‘When she first told me that she was pregnant, I thought she was lying – I accused her of making it up to win me back.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say, unable to disguise my dismay.

  ‘I know,’ he replies, his expression grim. ‘All we’d done for two weeks was snipe at each other and throw accusations around. I know that’s not an excuse, but that’s how it was.’

  ‘And then?’ I press gently.

  ‘She showed me the test, then made me sit in the bathroom with her while she did another one, just to prove that she was telling the truth.’

  He screws his face up. ‘I should never have let her do that.’

  I wait for him to gather himself again before giving him another soft, verbal nudge to continue the story.

  ‘She was really happy, and so sure that the baby would change everything,’ he tells me. ‘We had talked about having a family one day, you know, before – so she knew I wanted children. But all I could think in the moment was that it was wrong. Her face when I told her …’ He stops, fresh anguish distorting his features.

  ‘It was horrible,’ he finishes.

  Turning from the view to face Pete, I take hold of his rigid hands and start to rub his fingers. I made sure I put on my coat before we came out here, but my gloves are back in the apartment in Como, and my fingers are stinging with cold.

  ‘She was doing what she always did, which was tell me how things were going to be,’ he recalls. ‘She told me that we were having the baby, and that we would be doing it together. I just saw red.’

  ‘Did you really try to persuade her to consider an abortion?’ I ask, needing to know the answer. Taggie had intimated as much when I was listening through the door of the office.

  ‘No.’ Pete shakes his head, the hurt back in his eyes. ‘All I said was that having the baby wouldn’t change anything between us, and she got so angry with me then. She was yelling at me that we had to at least try to make things work, for the baby’s sake, but she wasn’t asking – she was telling. I’d had five years of her telling me what to do, and I just snapped. I couldn’t do it any more.’

  He lets out a long, deep sigh and stares out across the lake.

  ‘I told her I didn’t want to raise a child with her,’ he mutters. ‘That I didn’t want this.’

  ‘Oh, Pete,’ I sigh, with sympathy rather than distaste.

  ‘I don’t even know why I said it,’ he says, shaking his head. He looks as if he might cry again, and I’m aware that I should wrap a comforting arm around him again, but something stops me.

  ‘It was the whole horrible situation we’d found ourselves in that I didn’t want, and all the hurt and pain – I didn’t mean the baby.’

  ‘But then she lost it,’ I finish, closing my eyes as an image of the Taggie I saw in the hospital floats unheeded into my mind, her poor face split in two with the pain of what was happening to her, what had already happened. It upsets me now even more than it did then. Whatever picture Pete has painted of Taggie, I have met her myself now, and I have my own view. I feel nothing but sorrow for her – for both of them.

  ‘Yes,’ he mutters, wiping his eyes. ‘She lost it. And she blames me for that.’

  ‘It’s not your fault,’ I tell him quickly. ‘It’s nobody’s fault.’

  ‘I know what she thinks,’ he says, his breath pooling in the cold air in front of us. ‘She thinks that because I didn’t jump for joy when I found out, that I somehow jinxed the whole pregnancy. Do you think she’s right?’

  I can’t bear the sadness in his eyes.

  ‘No,’ I say, finally stepping forwards and sliding my arms around his back so I can hug him. ‘She’s not right about that. I suppose blaming you helps her not to blame herself as much, which I bet she still does, regardless. That’s the thing, though – neither of you could have done anything that would have made any difference either way. There is no blame, because there is no one at fault.’

  ‘She moved out the morning after she told me she was pregnant,’ he goes on, holding me tightly against him. ‘Told me she was going to stay with her folks for a while. I must have messaged and called hundreds of times, but she never responded. I didn’t hear anything from her for three weeks – not a text or anything – then Manny called and told me she’d been taken to hospital, and …’

  He didn’t need to finish the end of that sentence, because I knew what had happened next. I’d been in the team who tended to her first.

  ‘And me?’ I ask tentatively, and feel him relax beneath my arms.

  ‘You were like an angel.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ I scold, but there’s a grain of happiness behind it.

  ‘I mean it,’ he insists. ‘You were the first person to be nice to me in what felt like forever. My friends were all pissed off with me about Taggie; my mum was on the phone daily, telling me to man up and beg for forgiveness; and that day in the hospital, Manny looked at me with such …’ He pauses, struggling to say the word. ‘Well, contempt,’ he adds sadly. ‘I know he had every right to be angry with me, but he knew me, Lulu, just like they all did. I wasn’t a monster, I was still the same old me. I just happened to have fallen out of love with my girlfriend.’

  I cast my mind back to all the conversations I’ve had with friends whose ex-partners did the same thing, and how we vilified them. Hell, I condemned my own mother for falling out of love. But there is truth in what Pete is saying, and it feels like an injustice purely because I’m the one standing here with him, months after it all happened – the one on his side of the emotional crater. But I know how agonising it must have been for Taggie, and when your emotions are as fragile as hers must have been, it’s impossible to be logical and fair. Her heart was broken, and so irrationality was winning over everything else.

  ‘She made it all sound so callous and grubby earlier tonight, this thing between you and me,’ Pete says then, his sniff turning into a sigh. ‘But it wasn’t like that. I know I met you at the worst possible time, but we just got on, didn’t we? For that ten minutes in the canteen, it was like a light had gone on after months of darkness. That sounds really cheesy, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘But I understand what you mean. I didn’t forget you for a moment, you know. I kept hoping that I would somehow bump into you again.’

  ‘All I did for weeks was work, and mope around at the flat. I didn’t see anyone, I barely spoke to anyone I didn’t have to. All the stuff with Taggie and the baby left me feeling so numb, and she point blank refused to see or speak to me. But through that whole time, at the edges of it all, you were there in my head. I don’t think I even realised it until Sean broke his leg and I saw you again, then as soon as I did, I just knew.’

  ‘I remember thinking it was fate,’ I say, smiling up at him as I remember how thrilled I was to see him.

  ‘Thank God Sean broke his leg,’ Pete adds, the hint of humour in his eyes again. ‘Remind me to buy him a pint sometime.’

  I smile in response, but I’m not ready to draw another of our lines and move forwards quite yet. I still have a few questions that I need answers to. It must be nearing midnight now, because I can hear the other guests crunching over the gravel and heading down the hill towards us. There’s a buzz of excited anticipation in th
e air, and I edge closer to Pete so that my voice will be muffled.

  ‘Did you really never speak to Taggie again?’ I say, and Pete sighs.

  ‘I tried to,’ he replies. ‘But her parents screened all my calls. After a while, Manny got in touch and told me that Taggie wanted to sell the flat, and that I should contact him from now on. That’s how it’s been until now – until I saw her standing there by the harbour in Bellagio. I had no idea she’d even left London, let alone the UK. After we lost the baby, she cut herself off from all our mutual friends, and I may as well have been dead to her most loyal crew. None of them would give me the time of day.’

  ‘Have you spoken to anyone about the miscarriage?’ I want to know, and he takes a deep breath that’s laced with discomfort.

  ‘I told my mum, but apart from that, just you,’ he admits.

  ‘Has it helped?’ I say, already knowing the answer.

  ‘It has,’ he confirms, kissing me lightly on the lips. ‘You have.’

  ‘One minute!’ someone calls from behind us, and I peer round Pete’s bulk to see a large crowd of people standing a little way away on the grass. Everyone’s faces are turned upward in preparation, and the charged atmosphere is making the air feel warmer somehow. By rights, tonight ought to have been the final crack in my already shattered relationship with Pete, but there are too many pieces I still need to make sense of in my head. I need to lay them out, like a broken-up jigsaw on a table, and work out if there’s a way of fitting them back together again. It can wait, though. There is still time.

  As I turn back around and feel Pete’s arms tighten around me, I see the distorted reflection of the first New Year firework explode across the surface of the lake.

  47

  Taggie

  I had thought it would be hard to watch as this year ended and another began. I assumed that I would think only of all the things I had lost, and the mistakes I had made that I could not undo. I was afraid that the clock would strike twelve and I would desperately try to claw the hands back around, force them to rotate unnaturally until I could take back what I wanted from the past. But when the crowds around us cheer and the fireworks begin to explode overhead, I feel nothing but relief. I have survived this year, I am still here, and I’m not alone.

  Marco and I left the bar just before midnight to come down here to the lake. It’s so busy tonight that it could be the middle of summer, except that it’s still absolutely freezing.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ I ask after a time. Marco refused to have his leather jacket back, and is standing next to me now in just shirtsleeves.

  ‘I am fine.’

  I peer closely at the tiny bumps all over his bare arm.

  ‘You look cold to me.’

  He stops watching the fireworks and turns to me.

  ‘I will live.’

  My stomach rumbles, and I try to remember if I had any dinner, or any lunch, for that matter, and find that I can’t. It feels like hours ago that I was up at the Casa Alta setting everything up for the party. Sal is not going to be happy with me when I eventually go back.

  ‘I think I’m going to get sacked,’ I tell Marco.

  ‘Maybe you should quit first,’ he replies. ‘Like me.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I agree. ‘I still can’t believe you did that.’

  Marco puts his head on one side, and I can see the reflections of the fireworks in his eyes.

  ‘Sometimes the right thing to do is obvious,’ he explains pragmatically.

  ‘I feel like it was all my fault,’ I reply sheepishly, jumping as an extra loud bang sends a shudder through the air.

  ‘It was not,’ he says gently. ‘Maybe it is fate that is to blame.’

  ‘I hate fate,’ I groan. ‘I’d much prefer it if we got to make all the rules.’

  ‘But you cannot control everything,’ he argues, clearly amused by me.

  ‘Why not?’ I demand.

  ‘Because,’ he murmurs, steering me gently out of the way of a passing group of girls wearing glow-in-the-dark bunny ears, ‘it is much more fun not knowing what is going to happen.’

  I consider this in silence, waiting until the last firework has crashed across the sky before replying. Infuriatingly, I must concede that he has a point. After all, I had no idea that I would end up down here with him tonight and, despite the circumstances and the constant ache in my heart, I’m not having a terrible time. Far from it. But I don’t want to let him win the argument, and so I say, ‘What about bad things?’

  He raises his shoulders, flinching slightly as the icy wind finds us.

  ‘Bad things happen.’

  ‘But if you knew they were coming, then perhaps you’d have time to prepare,’ I point out. ‘You wouldn’t get caught unawares.’

  ‘Did a bad thing happen to you tonight?’ he asks then.

  I close my mouth.

  ‘Taggie?’

  I don’t know how to even begin to tell him, so I just shake my head.

  ‘OK,’ he says, seemingly nonplussed. ‘Shall we go and watch the band?’

  I follow him through the cluster of people peeling away from the fence set up around the lake. Now that the display has come to an end, the families with younger children are heading to bed, and I’m forced to run a veritable gauntlet of pushchairs and prams. If it wasn’t for the cruel meddling of fate, I’d still be pregnant. Well on my way to becoming a mother for the first time. The fact that I’m not still feels like a sick joke, and I’m forced to take a few deep breaths to stem my tears.

  Marco, who has reached instinctively to take my hand, as the two of us are jostled from side to side by human traffic, doesn’t appear to be aware of my turmoil, and once again I feel gratitude towards him for understanding when not to pry. By asking me that one simple question just now, he’s letting me know that the door to the conversation is open, but that he has no intention of making me walk through it. Whenever something was bothering me with Pete, he would prod and poke and badger at me until I gave in, and we would inevitably end up arguing. No matter how many times it happened, he never seemed to learn not to behave that way, and it was so bloody exasperating. Then again, I think guiltily, perhaps my need to control everything was just as annoying for him.

  ‘Look.’ Marco has stopped walking and is pointing at the sky. Grateful for the interruption to my depressing train of thought, I glance up and feel my eyes widen with pleasure. There are hundreds of Chinese paper lanterns in the air, each one glowing bright gold against the blackness, and I watch as they soar upwards away from the earth.

  ‘Each one is a wish,’ he tells me, taking a step closer until he’s standing right behind me. I can feel the heat of his breath on the back of my neck. ‘You whisper what you want into the lantern before you set it free, and then it searches the universe to find it.’

  Predictable tears well in my eyes.

  The lanterns are merging with the stars high above us now, and it’s becoming difficult to tell them apart. After I miscarried, my mum tried to comfort me by telling me to think of the soul I had lost as a star, something that will never dim in beauty or vitality, and at the time I’d dismissed her with scorn, just as I’d cursed the stars earlier tonight. Standing here now with Marco, though, looking up at this twinkling tapestry of hope and wishes, I finally understand why she said it. And not only that, I find that the idea comforts me, too.

  ‘We should get one,’ I say, unable to tear my eyes away from the spectacle. ‘You could wish for your boat.’

  Marco lets out a laugh, before placing a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You are sweet,’ he tells me, sounding genuinely touched. ‘But I have already had one wish granted tonight.’

  There’s a pause as I wonder whether or not to ask him what he means. The amaretto-induced tipsiness I felt immediately after leaving the bar has lessened now, and my nerve has gone with it. I can’t assume he’s referring to me, but then I also don’t see how it could be anything else. His delivery is so often matter-of-fact
– it makes him very difficult to read. I’m not sure if I prefer this more serious version of Marco, or the playful one who flicks my ponytail – but I know that I like both more with every passing hour.

  Before I can formulate any of my thoughts into words, however, Marco has taken hold of my hand again and is leading me on through the melee of tourists and locals towards the stage. There’s a vigorous Italian folk band called Circo Abusivo playing live, each member dressed in an array of colours and a funny hat, and the mood in the audience is one of exuberant joy. It’s impossible not to feel cheered by the bouncy beat and the cheeky lyrics, and soon even the perpetually cool Marco is bopping along with abandon, his cheeks pink with effort and a wide smile making him look even more handsome than usual. Groups of Italian teens are dancing together in circles, their shrieks of pleasure making me laugh, and I look up at Marco to see that he’s chuckling, too.

  It feels like my big showdown with Pete up at the Casa Alta happened days ago, let alone hours. Finding out that he’d been at the hospital after all, but not come in to see me, was upsetting. But then to discover he’d met and presumably fallen for Lucy on the very same day … That had felt unforgivable. But is it really? I’ve spent so many months now dwelling on what happened, so many hours have been wasted just going over and over the events of those few weeks, when what I should have been doing is trying my best to move on. Being here now, in one of my favourite places with – yes, I can’t deny it any longer – one of my favourite people, has reminded me that life does go on, and that it’s OK to not be sad all the time, or angry. I’m tired of all that. For the rest of tonight, at least, I’m going to shut Pete and what happened away in a closed area of my mind, and try to leave it there.

  Marco and I continue dancing together until the band has played their third encore, then we traipse slowly back towards the city centre with the rest of the New Year stragglers. The stars are still there, pinpricks of light decorating the heavy curtain of night, and strains of music drift across the lake from the opposite shore. There is rubbish all over the pavements, but I know that by dawn it will be gone. The people of Como are very serious when it comes to taking care of their beautiful town, and I love them for it.