by Lisa Jewell
She shook her head and smiled. “She is lovely,” she said again. “But . . .”
Adrian watched her forming her next words.
“I’m not quite feeling it.”
“You’re not quite feeling . . . ?”
He stared at the cat, looking at her objectively for the first time. He’d never been a cat person and he assumed that they were all much of a muchness. Four legs. Whiskers. Triangles for ears. Roughly the size of a briefcase. None of the endless, glorious variations of the dog form: ears that mopped the floor, ears that reached for the moon, flat snouts, pointy snouts, size of a squirrel, size of a small pony.
“The connection.”
He rubbed the point of his chin between his fingers and thumb and tried to look as though he could see her concern. “Right.”
“Can I think about it?” she said, hoisting the strap of her neat little oyster-gray handbag up onto her shoulder.
“Of course! Of course! Yes, you’re the only person who replied to the ad so the ball is firmly in your court.”
She smiled at him. “Great. Can I come back? Maybe tomorrow? Meet her again?”
Adrian laughed. What a strange girl. “Er, yes. I should think so. Although I’ll be out and about a lot. Have you got my number? So you can call?”
“Sure.” She gave him her hand to shake. “I’ll call you midmorning. See what we can arrange.”
“Good.” Adrian followed her towards his front door, opened it up for her.
“Wow,” she said, looking at his whiteboard, nailed to the wall above his desk. “This looks pretty boggling.”
“Yes. Boggling is the word. A little like my life. This”—he gestured at the chart—“is all that stands between me and total existential chaos.”
She paused, a smile playing on her lips, and ran her finger across the words Pearl 10th Birthday. Strada Upper St. 6:30 p.m. “Have you got her present?”
He started at the question. So intrusive, yet so reasonable.
“Yes,” he said. “Actually I have.”
“Well done!” she said. “Very organized. Right. Well, I’ll call you tomorrow. And thank you. Thank you for giving me time to think about it. Very important decision. Not one to be rushed.”
“No, no, absolutely not.”
He closed the door behind her and felt compelled to lean heavily against it, almost as though she’d taken his center of gravity with her when she left.
The whiteboard had been Maya’s idea. Maya was one of those people who saw straight through to the core of the issue and sorted it. And the issue was that even though all he wanted was for everyone to be happy, he kept doing things that made people unhappy. And he wished he didn’t care. He wished he could just shrug and say, Well, you know, that’s life, nobody’s perfect. But every time he forgot a child’s birthday or an arrangement to watch a theatrical performance or to attend an awards ceremony, he was filled with seething self-hatred. His sprawling, unconventional family was a product entirely of the decisions he had made and therefore it was up to him to make sure that nobody felt the aftershocks. But still they came. Bang: a crying daughter. Crash: a disappointed son. Boom: an irked ex-wife.
“Poor Adrian,” Maya had said one day after he’d had a terrible phone call with Caroline about a parent–teacher meeting he’d forgotten to attend.
Adrian had sighed and laid his head upon Maya’s shoulder and said, “I’m a disaster zone. A human wrecking ball. I just wish I could show the children that even though I’m a disorganized fuckwit, actually I’m thinking about them every minute of every day.”
And she’d unveiled this thing. They’d called it the Board of Harmony. The whole year mapped out and color-coded: children’s birthdays, ex-wives’ birthdays, ex-mothers-in-law’s birthdays, who was spending Christmas where, who was starting big school or leaving university, the half-terms and holidays of three school-age children and the travel arrangements and job interviews of two adult children. If he spoke to a child and they told him something about their life, no matter how inconsequential, he would write it here: Cat looking at flats this weekend. That way, the next time he spoke to Cat he would be sure to remember to ask her about it. It was all there. All the tiny minutiae of the lives of the families he’d created and vacated.
Adrian had never intended for his life to get this convoluted. Two ex-wives. One late wife. Three sons. Two daughters. Three houses. And a cat. But more than that, not just those direct connections, but all the other countless people who’d been drawn into his world through these temporary families: the boyfriends and girlfriends of his children, the mothers and fathers of their best friends, the favored teachers, the mothers- and fathers- and sisters- and brothers-in-law, these people who were his beloved children’s aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins. People who had once played a huge part in his life and continued to play a huge part in the lives of his children. People he couldn’t just stop thinking about and knowing about and caring about purely because he was no longer in love with their daughter/sister/aunt.
And there it was. The sharp needle of tragedy, in the softest part of his belly, as he thought about Maya. Who’d left nothing. Not really. Parents whom he’d barely got to know, a brother he’d never met apart from briefly at their wedding, a brittle best friend who appeared to hold him responsible for her death. And this cat. This cat who had just failed to make a connection with a beautiful young woman called Jane and who, consequently, was still here, curled up like a sleek apostrophe in a shaft of sunlight.
He walked across the room and sat beside the cat. He observed it for a moment. Maya had babied this cat, talked about it all the time, bought it expensive treats and toys it never played with. He’d watched her, bemused. And then one day, a few weeks before their wedding, and although she’d never asked, he’d told her he could afford one more baby. “Just a small one,” he’d said, holding his hands a few inches apart. “One we could keep in a box maybe. Or a pocket.”
“What if it grew?” she’d said.
“Well, we’d squash it down a bit,” he’d said, miming patting down the sides of a small baby.
“So it would need to be quite a spongy baby?”
“Yes,” he’d said. “Ideally.”
He put one hand onto the cat’s back and it jumped at his touch. As well it might. He rarely touched her. But then it softened and revealed its belly to him, a cushion of thick black fur, two tufted rows of pink nipples. He placed his hand against it and left it there, feeling the comforting sense of warm flesh and blood beneath his palm. The cat pawed at his hand playfully, and for a moment Adrian felt something human towards the animal, the “connection” that the girl called Jane had mentioned. Maybe she was right, he pondered. Maybe he did still need this living, breathing piece of Maya in his life. Then, as the thought passed through his grieving mind, he squeezed the cat’s front leg gently and recoiled with a pained cry as the cat pierced the pale, thin skin of his inner wrist with one tiny hooked claw.
“Ow. Shit.” He brought his wrist to his mouth and sucked it. “What did you do that for?”
The cat sprang to its feet and leaped from the sofa at the sound of his raised voice. He stared at his wrist, at the tiny pinprick in his skin, darkly black-red, but not bleeding. He continued to stare at it, willing it to bleed, willing it to yield something human and hot and bright. But it didn’t.
4
It was Saturday night. Again. The forty-seventh Saturday night since Maya had died.
They didn’t get any easier.
Adrian wondered idly what his family was doing. He pictured them lined up in front of th
e television watching whatever show was currently the big Saturday night thing. What was it the kids had made him watch last weekend when they were here? Something with Ant and Dec in it. He could barely remember. He was just grateful it wasn’t one of those gruesome talent shows with people crying all over the place.
As the shadows grew long upon the pavement outside and a light shower of rain started to patter against the windowpanes, Adrian poured himself a glass of wine and pulled the laptop towards himself.
He had not realized until Maya had died and left him on his own for the first time since he was nineteen years old that he had no friends. He’d had friends in the past, but they’d come as part of the package of his two former marriages. The friends he’d had in Sussex with Susie had stayed in Sussex with Susie. The friends he’d had with Caroline had taken her side entirely in the aftermath of his affair with Maya. Or rather, the sides of their wives. And he and Maya hadn’t made any friends because they’d been too busy keeping everybody happy.
Some odd-bods had popped up after Maya died, people he’d never expected to hear from again: the slightly sinister deputy head of the girls’ school that Maya had taught at, with whom he’d once had a long and very strained conversation at a fund-raising evening; the ex-husband of a friend of Caroline’s, whose nasal voice he and Caroline had taken great joy in impersonating behind his back; the rather bellicose father of Pearl’s friend, whom Adrian had only ever met in ninety-second bursts on their respective doorsteps when delivering and collecting children. They’d forced him into pubs and even on occasion into nightclubs. They’d poured alcohol into him until he looked as though he was having a good time and then they’d tried to get unsuitable women to talk to him. “This is my friend Adrian. He’s just lost his wife.”
There’d also been a swarm of women in the wake of Maya’s death. Mainly mothers of school friends, the very same women who’d looked at him in such disgust when they heard that he’d left Caroline, now circling him with wide, caring eyes, bringing him things to eat in Tupperware boxes, which he’d then have to wash up and return with words of gratitude.
He hadn’t wanted them then. He’d wanted to stay inside and cry and ask himself why why why.
Now, eleven months later, he still didn’t know why but he’d given up asking.
The girl called Jane came again the next day. This time her honey hair was down, blow-dried into loops that flipped off her collarbone, her fringe parted in the center and hanging either side of her face, as though she was peering through stage curtains. In the moments before her arrival Adrian had done things that he did not wish to consider too deeply. He had taken Maya’s hand mirror from a dark corner of his flat to a bright corner of his flat and he had examined his face in great and unedifying detail in the light from a west-facing window. Maya had been thirty when he met her and he’d been forty-four. He’d seen himself as a young forty-four. A full head of dark brown hair, bright hazel eyes, upturned smile lines, still the face in the mirror that he expected to see there.
Time and grief were cruel at any age, but particularly at this middle point of physical flux, when the face became like a flickering image in a pretentious video art installation, in and out of focus, young-old, young-old, young again. At some point in the moments after Maya’s death, the image had stopped flickering and there it was. Static. The face of someone older than he’d ever thought he’d be. He had not looked in mirrors very much these last few months, but now he wanted to know what he looked like. He wanted to see what Jane would see.
In minute detail, he saw that his jawline had begun to collapse; he saw folds and crenellations in the skin of his neck that put him in mind of the wild, tide-creased beaches of north Norfolk. He saw yellowish pillows of flesh beneath his eyes; he saw that his skin was dry, his hazel eyes were faded and his hair had achromatized, from rich dark brown to something like the color of a wet pavement.
Once this process was complete he’d got into the shower and done things to his face with the contents of tubes and bottles left there by Maya. He had washed his hair twice, until it squeaked clean beneath his fingertips. And then for possibly the first time in his life he put conditioner on it. He did not ask himself why. He just did it. Then he ironed himself a shirt. A green shirt that Maya had once said brought out the hazel of his eyes. And he used Maya’s hair dryer on his hair, running his fingers through it, teasing it into something sleek and fragrant.
He cursed himself silently as he watched the clock turn from 11:22 to 11:23, seven minutes before her appointed arrival. “You fool,” he muttered under his breath. “You total and utter ball sack.” He filled the kettle and he pushed things around the kitchen counter to make it look more welcoming. “Forty-eight,” he muttered to himself. “You’re forty-eight. You’re a widower. You’re a tosser.”
And then there she was, curiously ageless, at his front door, with her mismatched eyes and her disingenuous fringe, smelling of jasmine and clean clothes. Her neat little bag was clutched at stomach level with both hands and she was wearing a soft gray coat, fastened with one single oversized button.
“Come in. Come in.”
“I’m really sorry,” she said, striding confidently into the hallway. “I know you must think I’m mad.”
“What? No!”
“Of course you do. It’s like I’m dating your cat. You know, courting her. Next thing I’ll be asking if I can take her out to dinner.”
Adrian looked at Jane and then laughed. “Be my guest,” he said. “She has impeccable manners. And doesn’t eat much.”
Jane headed towards the cat, which was in its usual spot on the back of the sofa by the front window. The cat turned at her approach and offered itself to her with a smiling face. “Hello,” said Jane, cupping the cat’s face inside her hand and appraising it affectionately. “You sweet girl.”
“Can I get you a tea?” asked Adrian. “A coffee? Water?”
“I’d love a coffee,” she said. “Bit of a night last night.”
Adrian nodded. She did not look as though she’d had a bit of a night last night. She did not, in fact, look like she’d ever had a bit of a night in her life. “Black?”
She smiled. “Black.”
When Adrian returned with the coffee he found Jane sitting on the sofa with the cat on her lap and a framed photograph of the little ones in her hand.
“These children are stunning,” she said, turning the photo to face him. “Are they all yours?”
He glanced at the photo. It was Otis, Pearl and Beau, in sou’westers and galoshes, knee-deep in a creek somewhere in the West Country. Behind them the sky was gunmetal gray, below them the water was steel and their brightly colored clothes burst through the dreary background almost as though the children had been cut out and glued on. Beau had his arm around Pearl’s waist and Pearl had her head in the crook of Otis’s shoulder. It was a happy photograph; all three children were smiling evenly and naturally with open eyes and relaxed mouths. Maya had taken it. The children had always smiled for Maya.
Adrian handed Jane her coffee and she put it on the tabletop. “Yes,” he said. “They are all mine.”
“What are their names?”
He glanced at her. He’d flossed his teeth for this woman—he could hardly be surprised if she wanted to ask him personal questions.
“Well,” he said, running his finger across the photograph. “That’s Otis, he’s twelve; that’s Pearl, she’s . . .”
“Nearly ten.”
He looked at her from the corner of his eye. She looked back at him playfully.
“Yes. She’s nearly ten. And this little munchkin is Beau. He just turned five.”
“Adorable,” she said, putting the photo carefully back on the table and picking up her coffee cup. “And they don’t live with you?”
“You’re very inquisitive,” he said, sitting himself down on the armchair opposite her.
“OK then. You’re nosy.”
She laughed. “Sorry, I just find other people’s lives fascinating. Always have.”
He smiled. “That’s OK. I’m the same.” He inhaled and ran his hand down his freshly shaved jaw. “No,” he said. “They don’t live with me. They live with their mum. In a five-story Georgian town house in Islington.”
“Wow.” Jane ran her eyes around the cramped living room, a silent acknowledgment of the fact that Adrian’s ex-wife had pulled the long straw.
“It’s fine,” he said quickly. He would hate for anyone to feel sorry for him, not for even a moment. “It’s good. There’s room for them all to squeeze in here every other weekend. Beau shares with me, Pearl and Otis in the spare room. It’s good.”
“So, you and your late wife, you didn’t have any children?”
“No.” Adrian shook his head. “Sadly not. Although, Jesus, I’m not sure what I’d have done if we had had a baby. I mean . . . I’d have had to give up work. And the whole precarious edifice would have come crashing down.”
“The big house in Islington . . .”
“Yes. And the cottage in Hove.”
She raised an eyebrow at him questioningly.
“Ex-wife number one,” he replied. “Susie. Mother of my two eldest children. Here . . .” He got to his feet and picked up another framed photograph. He passed it to her. “Cat and Luke. My big ones.”
She stared at the photograph with wide eyes. “You make very special children,” she said. “How old are these two?”
“Cat will be twenty in May. Luke is twenty-three.”
“Grown-ups now?”
“Yes. Grown-ups now. Although sometimes it doesn’t feel like it.”