by Carol Mason
‘What?’
He gazed at her, appreciating her, like someone who was being given something he thought he didn’t deserve. ‘Nothing,’ he whispered. ‘I’m just overwhelmed.’
She entwined her fingers with his.
He made love to her in a way that she had never known, gently unwrapping her from her remaining undergarments, then bearing down on her with the sort of manly, territorial claim that she’d experienced only in some outlying fantasy world. Once or twice, the image of Mark tried to force an entry, but she pushed it away. While she was here with Eddy on Holy Island, this was another life she was leading.
This was what it was supposed to be like, she thought, after. She had been right in sensing something was missing. This was missing. They fitted like teeth on a zip.
‘You have an incredible heart-shaped face,’ he told her, stroking her jaw like you would a kitten’s. He’d said it before. The only description of herself that would ever matter. She was so moved to be feeling this intensity only now, at the ripe old age of forty, that tears rolled into her hair.
‘I wonder what my mother would think if she saw us lying here,’ she said, a long time later, after he had held her so closely that when she moved away from him slightly, her skin was saturated with their sweat.
‘I hope she’d think it was the way it had to be . . .’ he said, appearing moved by his own comment. ‘I think we’d make a good plot of a movie. Small-town girl marries rich man in the big city, then she falls for her old life and her old love: the poor man with the bad singing voice, whom she once stood up.’ He kissed her intermittently between speaking, like you might punctuate a long sentence with commas.
‘It’s a nice story. But it’s a fairy tale, isn’t it?’ She only meant it lightly. She didn’t want reality to rain down on them. Right now, she would do anything in her power to keep it at bay.
‘I’m actually the reverse of a fairy tale, aren’t I? Anyway, you’ve had the fairy tale already.’ He rolled on to his back, and stared contemplatively at the ceiling, slightly melancholy; she could feel the shift in his thinking – reality was pressing in despite their desire to exist only in a bubble. He looked at her, intently. ‘If I were a wealthy man, I’d love to give you everything you deserve, Evelyn. But I could really only provide you with a very simple life. Nothing like what you’re used to. It would be naive to promise you love as a substitute for all that.’
She didn’t need to ask herself if she was in love with him. It would have been a wasted exercise. She’d been in love with him from that very first day. Knowing it, as she knew it now, brought her mistake pressing either side of her head with monster-like hands – the mistake of having ever let him go. ‘Love is never a substitute, Eddy. Everything else is a substitute for love.’
He stroked her face again. She thought vaguely of the life she was used to, and only how utterly detached she felt from it, now that she was experiencing something greater than the sum of all her life’s parts. She touched his shoulder. Too much talking was going to shatter the fragile perfection of it, like blowing too near a dandelion clock. ‘Let’s not get too ahead of ourselves, though. Can we keep it light?’
‘I feel like I’m in a rush because we have such little time.’
She told him that she had extended her ticket for another week.
‘What?’ he said, sitting up. ‘Another week? Why didn’t you tell me?’
Relief flooded his face suddenly. He kissed her before she could answer. Then he sighed and fell back on to the pillow again. ‘But then this week will come and go, and then we’re back here again, in this position again, aren’t we?’
She leant over him, and looked seriously into his eyes, the ends of her long, dark hair pooling on his chest. ‘We live for today – literally. Every minute we have together is a bonus we never expected. We take it, and we savour it, and we don’t overthink it. We don’t think, full stop.’ She popped another kiss on his mouth, kissed him all over his cheeks, his forehead. ‘Can we do that?’
‘We can try,’ he smiled.
They deliberately stopped talking. They lay there, instead, just enjoying the composition of themselves, perhaps both of them trying to deny what it was all adding up to. Then she said – so much for not thinking – ‘How can we have got in so deep, Eddy?’ They had been born into the same world, but had found themselves in vastly different ones. They ought to have nothing in common. She ought not to feel right with him, but she did. ‘You were just a man at a wedding.’
‘I don’t know how, Evelyn. But I was in deep the first second I saw you, and I’m going to selfishly and impractically want you in my arms like this until my dying day. That’s just the reality of it.’
Something occurred to her, in that moment. She had a sense of possibility – a sense that some of the best days of her life hadn’t happened yet. She smiled, because it was a lovely prospect.
FOURTEEN
Alice
‘What’s the prospect of you ever agreeing with me?’ Justin is lying on his side, his head propped on an upturned hand, looking down at me. ‘You’re so contrary.’
‘All I said was, it was a completely pointless film!’ I grin at him because he’s looking at me as though I’m an idiot. ‘It had no ending. It just, well, it just petered out . . . It was a total waste of two hours of my life!’
‘It did have an ending. You were supposed to supply it, using your im-ag-in-ation. You know, if you have one.’
I pick up a pillow and bash him over the head.
He grabs it off me, throws it across the bedroom, pulls me on to his chest by my upper arms and kisses me. ‘Argumentative Alice,’ he whispers. He flips me on to my back. I chuckle and knot my ankles around his waist. We have made love twice before that unbelievably banal, waste-of-life film – before and after our takeaway curry.
‘Condom?’ I say.
He looks at me, and stops. ‘Gosh! We’ve run out.’
I push at his shoulders. ‘What? How?’
‘Excuse me, I’m always astonished by my own prowess, but even I didn’t think we’d be doing it three times.’
‘No glove. No love,’ I practically sing.
He gives me a horrified look. ‘God, you didn’t seriously say that, did you?’
I beam. ‘No.’ I look across my shoulder. ‘It was her.’ I pull a face at the imaginary joy-killer. ‘Shut up, you!’
‘You’re a nutter.’ He pulls me to him again, to continue where we left off.
Afterward, we are back to the ‘side position, propped up on elbow, looking at one another’ thing, and I say, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that we didn’t use anything?’ It brings back memories of Colin. How – and this really is between me, my memory and the four walls – I used to try to convince him not to use protection. There was a time when I’d actually imagined that if I’d got pregnant, the very nature of learning you’re about to be a father would have convinced him that he wanted to be one. I really was that deluded.
‘Not really,’ Justin says. ‘I’m fine if you don’t want to use birth control. I mean, I would understand.’
‘Hang on . . . You want me to be the mother of your children? Out of wedlock?’
‘Leave my Catholic values out of this, thank you!’ He appears to be contemplating his proper response a second or two longer than you’d think would be necessary, given that it was a fairly basic question. Then he says, ‘Well, obviously I assume we’re going to, you know, have some sort of future together.’
‘As in, get married?’
‘That . . . Yes. But I’m just saying, as you get older, you think about these things more seriously. A woman’s biological clock. Or at least, a woman you care about.’
‘You think I’m approaching my sell-by date.’
He kisses me quickly and smiles – caught out. I go to bring another pillow down on his head.
‘I’m not being insulting!’ He pretends to hide behind his hands. ‘Or maybe I am . . . In which case, I’m sorry; that w
as not my intent. I just mean that, well, obviously you want to have a kid when you know you’re likely to have a healthy baby, right?’
I scowl at him. ‘But there’s never any guarantee of that.’
‘No. But your chances of a lot of things increase with waiting, Alice. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m thinking about myself in this, too. I’m thirty-eight. I also have a clock, in a way. I don’t want to be a sixty-year-old with a teenager, or be worrying about paying for their education when I’m seventy. And, like I say, I just have a feeling we’re going somewhere.’
‘Why do we have to be going somewhere?’ I’m not sure why I’m asking this. It is a lot like tempting fate. Perhaps it’s because I’d always wanted a future from my relationships, and I’d never got one, so I’m operating with reverse psychology.
‘Don’t we?’ He frowns.
I can tell this question has wrong-footed him slightly.
‘Because if we’re not, then you should say.’ He sits up. He isn’t chilled out any more. I have spoilt something. Again. ‘I think it’s important for honesty here, Alice. I certainly wouldn’t want to be wasting your time, and, frankly, I don’t want my own wasted, either.’ He’s become way too serious, and I wish I’d never said it. Why do I have to sabotage everything? It’s so damned annoying. ‘Time isn’t really on our side quite as much as we always like to think.’
‘Considering my womb is nearly collecting its pension.’
‘Precisely.’ He pretend-flinches, no doubt expecting me to attack him with a pillow again. I love his good-natured ability to change shadow to light.
‘Justin. Can I ask you something? Do you ever know how to answer simple, harmless questions without always making a big, heavy deal of everything?’
He scowls again. ‘What have I made a big heavy deal of? Fuck, Alice! You asked me if it bothered me that we didn’t use birth control, and I said no!’
‘You’re such a weirdo.’
‘Then we balance each other out. Because you’re so perfect. Obviously.’
I beam another smile. ‘Is right!’
We hold eyes, and I mentally say the things I will never say to him. With each passing day, Justin is turning out to be less and less like any man I’ve known, when it comes to his perspective on life, his maturity, and the fact that he genuinely seems to care about things that don’t just directly impact himself. He never appears confused, like all the others – when it comes to what he wants and, more importantly, about whether he wants me. He seems so certain of us that I do not trust it. I will eat, sleep, wake up, and the fact that Justin is there beside me, happy to be with me, still feels like something sent to mess with me.
I owe him my seriousness, though, as it is a serious subject. ‘I do want children, Justin – just to finish this point. Very much. But I would never rush into something to make it happen. I tend to be the kind of person who accepts things for what they are. Everything happens for a reason. So if it never happens, then some things are just not meant to be. I’ll be at peace with my life, whether or not kids are a part of it.’
A lovely warm expression lights his eyes; I can’t stop looking at them. ‘I love that you have that perspective on things.’ He takes hold of my hand, momentarily mesmerised by the sight of my fingers in his. ‘It’s just important for me that you know that I’m not going to string you along. I’m not the kind of person who would do that to someone. I didn’t do it to Lisa, and I’d certainly not do it to you.’
Lisa. Justin rarely speaks of his ex-girlfriend. I am still not crystal clear on why they broke up. So when her name suddenly comes up again, it resonates with me perhaps more than it should.
I go on looking at him. He wants marriage and a baby. He’s a fair person – he truly cares about me, perhaps on the same level as he cares about himself, because he doesn’t want to string me along, any more than he wants to be strung along himself. How did I find this fabulous man? And yet am I ready for all that he is? Can I be the lawyer’s wife, and mother of his children? Can I cope with his structure? With the intense, serious, sorted-out person he is – who, in many ways, is the very opposite of me? And then it dawns on me: What am I thinking? Of course I can cope! It’s everything I’ve always wanted. Love. Stability. Family. A decent man. And I love him. Let’s not forget that.
He gets up. He crosses the room and gazes out of the window into the spotted nightlights of Newcastle. ‘I know we’ve not known each other forever, and I hope you don’t think this is all moving too fast, but I feel something. It’s just a sense of optimism every time I look at you. I felt it from day one.’
I am with him on this. I’d have called it rightness. Overwhelming, incontestable rightness and belonging. Yet coming out of his mouth, optimism feels bigger. I stare at his back, his broad, bare shoulders, suddenly remembering what he said about the ill health in his family. I say a silent prayer, even though I am not the praying type: Please God, don’t let anything happen to him, like it did to his dad.
He turns around, meets my eyes and smiles. The qualities that make Justin different from any man I’ve known are the things that make me love him and yet are also the things that make me worry. He isn’t emotionally one-dimensional. He doesn’t seem to roll with the punches. There is a soft, gentle, thinking side to him that makes me wonder how strong he would be when push comes to shove. Though he would hate that I thought this.
‘So . . . are we in love?’ I ask him. I think of him just mentioning Lisa and wish he’d never said that name.
‘Are you in love?’ he asks.
Not how the answer was meant to go. ‘Well . . .’ I try to sound light. ‘I’ve always had this policy of not being the one to say it first.’
It isn’t true. Normally, I am the first one to say it: sometimes the only one. And the crazy thing is, sometimes I’d said it when I hadn’t even felt it, which makes me wonder why I had this need to declare bogus feelings just to get them to state where they stood. Why did I want to know if they loved me first, before deciding whether it was mutual? It felt more than a little messed up.
‘I’m not prepared to settle for anything less than in love, Justin. I sold myself short in my other relationships. And I don’t know if that was because, at heart, I’m a bit like my mother – I tend to fall for unreliable men – or if I just have questionable self-esteem. But I’m determined not to do that again. I just don’t need to be with someone so badly that I’ll take whatever terms they offer me.’
I sense he’s listening to me with every fibre of his being. He watches me for a long time, processing my words, processing me – or so it feels. I don’t know what he’s going to say, but somewhere far inside of me I almost want to say, Don’t, anyway.
‘Alice.’ He’s so damned grave. ‘The one thing I can say is you deserve someone who is so completely sure that you’re the one thing in his life he could never stand to lose.’ He pauses. He’s going to say, But you’re right. I’m not him. Only instead he looks distantly across the room and his face floods with something more indelible than sadness; I can’t say what it is, but I almost can’t look. ‘You know, all my life I’ve wanted to be like my father. The kind of man he was. The kind of husband, dad . . . My father loved my mother so much. They seem to draw energy and purpose from one another, and the spark that existed between them, well, you couldn’t not see it. Even I saw it, and I was just a kid. And yet look how fast my mother remarried after he died, which made me wonder all over again . . . Had it all just been an illusion?’ He looks back at me. ‘Were they both acting a role, and doing it so damned convincingly because their values had made them believe they had to? Then I wondered, do you ever really know someone? Is there really only one person for us in this world? Or is that all a bit of a myth of evolution that we are sold to somehow make us commit, produce offspring and feel inadequate if we screw it all up? Could you probably love, and live with, anyone if you put your mind to it?’
‘What’s this got to do with us, Justin?’
He sighs, frustrated. He does this occasionally. As though the weight of his complicated thought process has to be lifted and repositioned once in a while just to make it bearable. ‘Alice, you’re a truly good person, and in many ways we have so much in common – our values, our outlook, the things we like to do . . . When I’m with you, I’m really not bothered about being around anybody else. I don’t really care where we go, or what we do, so long as we do it together.’ He comes and sits on the end of the bed, runs a hand over my cheek and twirls a strand of my hair around his index finger. ‘I feel so at peace with you that way. You make me extremely happy. I look forward to getting to see you every day, and I know that, more than anything, I want to make you happy and do what’s right by you.’ His hand slides to the back of my head, cupping it. I can feel the pleasant press of his warm fingers. ‘So yes, I believe I’m in love with you.’
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way he looks at me. It’s up there with the way he looked at me in that bar, that first day.
‘So, what about Lisa? Were you in love with her?’ When I see his face, I say, ‘It’s important for me to know. To have a picture.’
I can almost see his brain ticking through the right way to reply. ‘I’m sure I must have thought I was, yes,’ he says, after a short spell. ‘There was a lot to love about her. But when it came down to it, it didn’t go the distance.’
He has said a version of this before: about it not going the distance. But, undoubtedly, it had gone some distance. They had met at Oxford. She was reading Law, too. She even found a job up North to be with him. They had lived together for two years, so I assume he must have been considering marrying her because he’d once said he’d never live with someone if he had no intention of a future. Justin is modern in so many ways, yet very old-fashioned in others.
‘And Jemma?’
‘Jemima!’