The Man I Didn't Marry

by Anna Bell

‘Things seem to be going well between you two,’ says Judy, leaning towards me like she’s settling in for a gossip.

  ‘Yeah, since we had our trip to London, things have definitely got better. He’s taken more of an interest in our life and trying really hard to learn Sasha’s routine,’ I say, trying to sound positive.

  ‘And you’re going out for a meal tonight?’ she says, encouraging me along.

  ‘Yeah, it’s a step in the right direction,’ I say.

  ‘Where are you headed?’ asks Mick.

  ‘La Flambé,’ I say, and Judy winces.

  ‘Really, you didn’t want to go to El Costellos or The Exchequer?’ she says, tilting her head to the side.

  ‘I thought of it, but Max and I had one of our first dates at La Flambé when we were both in Fleet.’

  ‘Oh, I remember that,’ says Judy. ‘He went out for a mysterious dinner and we didn’t find out until a couple of months later that it was with you. But you know, the other restaurants might be a better choice.’

  ‘I like the idea of you going somewhere you’ve been before,’ says Mick, with a twinkle in his eye. ‘Stir up a little of that old magic.’

  ‘Steady on, Mick, you’re coming across as an old romantic,’ says Judy.

  ‘I’ve always been romantic,’ he says, sighing.

  She scoffs and the easy-going atmosphere between the two of them ebbs away.

  Max reappears. ‘Right, I’m ready.’

  ‘You’re going to love Le Flambé, one of our favourites, eh Judy?’ says Mick.

  She doesn’t look so sure but she nods along anyway.

  ‘Shall we?’ says Max.

  ‘I guess. Are you sure you’re going to be OK?’

  ‘We’ll be fine,’ says Judy, ushering us out the door.

  The short drive to the restaurant is filled with Max asking me questions about our first trip here and by the time we arrive I’ve been properly interrogated about it.

  ‘I think this place has changed hands since we last came, but it’s still French,’ I say as we pull in, keeping everything crossed that it hasn’t changed dramatically like the mini-golf.

  ‘Is it open?’ asks Max as I park in the empty car park.

  ‘Yeah, I phoned to book a table this afternoon. Strange, you’d think on a Saturday night it would be heaving.’

  We get out the car and walk through the door, relieved to see another couple a bit older than us sat at a table in the corner. I begin to relax.

  The interior hasn’t changed since we were last here. It’s still got the red net curtains hanging in the windows and the wine bottles encrusted with wax used as candle holders on the table.

  A waitress who looks like she’s in her late teens breezes up to us with an air of confidence that I certainly never had at her age or, perhaps, any age. She’s dressed in skinny black jeans, a floaty white blouse and a black waistcoat with her hair plaited to one side and she’s wearing bright-red lipstick.

  ‘Can I help?’ she says in a heavy French accent, almost shouting over the loud accordion music that’s being piped out of the speakers.

  ‘We’ve got a table booked for two, under the name of Voss.’

  ‘Voss, very good,’ she says.

  She looks around the almost empty restaurant and puts us at the table next to the other couple.

  ‘Is it possible to sit somewhere else?’ I say, gesturing to the empty restaurant.

  ‘But this is the best table,’ she says, lowering her voice so that the other couple don’t hear.

  ‘OK, then,’ says Max, taking the menu and sitting down.

  ‘Chef’s recommendations today are the boeuf bourguignon and the fish of the day is cod. Would you like a drink, some wine?’ she says, looking at me.

  ‘I’m not drinking, because of the baby,’ I say, patting my belly.

  She looks down at the bump.

  ‘But you can have one glass, surely?’

  ‘I think I’ll just stick to fizzy water, thanks.’

  ‘And I’ll just have a large beer, thanks,’ says Max.

  She nods curtly and walks off.

  ‘Why are French women so intimidating?’ says Max, peering over the top of his menu.

  ‘I know, and they’re so glamorous too.’

  ‘So are you, in your dress,’ he says, not looking up from his menu. ‘You know, it’s brave to wear a dress with a rollneck like that. Let’s not forget the last time I saw you in a top with one.’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say, cringing at the thought. The night he’d pulled the tissue paper out of my bra when we were teenagers, I’d been wearing a rollneck cropped top. I’d felt self-conscious enough with my belly on display and the tissue paper in my bra, but then Max had told me that girls only wore those tops so they could hide love bites. I’d spent the whole night avoiding any boy that came near me, worried I was giving out some kind of secret signal. ‘You know, someone once told me that girls only wear them for one reason.’

  ‘Oh yeah,’ he says, unable to hide his smile. ‘I remember that. I don’t think I’ve given anyone a love bite since I was about that age. Oh God, don’t tell me that you’re going to correct me?’

  I shake my head.

  ‘I’ve never had one.’

  ‘Really?’ he says. ‘Not even when you went to Sixth Form?’

  ‘Nope,’ I say, not sure if I’ve really missed out from not having that teenage rite of passage. ‘I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that not many boys kissed me in Sixth Form.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be surprised?’

  ‘Come on, the whole Spider thing? Max, you keep saying it yourself that you find it hard to see me as anyone other than who I was when I was younger.’

  What am I doing? This is supposed to be a date where I try and convince him to see me as something other than that teenage girl and I’m reminding him of it?

  ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t mean to say that I didn’t think you were pretty,’ he says.

  ‘Max, you don’t have to say things like that. Cara Worthington said the other day that they voted you Most Fuckable 1997; you and I were in different leagues then.’

  He laughs out loud. ‘God, I’d forgotten that.’

  ‘You knew?’

  ‘Oh yeah. I think they even gave me an award that someone had made in woodwork. I wonder if Mum’s still got it in the loft.’

  I shake my head.

  ‘You know what I was voted in our school leavers’ book? Most Likely to Do Your Tax Return.’

  Max laughs again. ‘Just because you were good at maths doesn’t mean to say that guys didn’t find you attractive. You remember your leavers’ ball when you and Rach were having your photos taken in our garden? You were wearing that long backless black dress?’

  ‘Oh, that dress. I had to wear stick-on bra pads and I spent the whole night terrified they were going to fall off.’

  ‘Well, you didn’t look terrified in the garden. You were posing and laughing with Rach and you looked hot in it. And I remember thinking that you’d finally realised that you were pretty.’

  ‘What?’ I say. ‘You’ve never told me this before.’

  ‘Have I not? Huh.’

  I can’t quite believe it. In all these years I never thought he’d once thought that about me when we were younger.

  ‘You’ve always been pretty, you were just a massive nerd,’ he says with a genuine smile.

  ‘Hey,’ I say as if to protest, but I’ve got no leg to stand on. ‘Just because we liked different things.’

  ‘You dressed with a long, knitted scarf round your neck for an entire year after you and Rach watched all those Dr Who boxsets.’

  ‘Oh my God,’ I say, thinking about how much I loved my younger self for not giving a shit. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  ‘I bet you still watch the new Dr Who?’

  ‘Of course I do. But I’ve never been able to get you to watch it.’

  My neck starts to tingle and I become increasingly aware of how clo
se the couple next to us are. I sense I’m being watched and I glance at their table and they’re both staring at me. They turn back to each other quickly, but they still don’t talk.

  ‘Didn’t they just get a new Doctor? The guy from The Thick of It?’ says Max, bringing me back to our conversation.

  ‘Oh, Peter Capaldi, yeah. But now they’ve got a woman playing the first female Doctor and it caused a lot of controversy.’

  The man at the table next to us does a huffing sound and I turn and glare at him before he looks back at his companion.

  ‘Why would that cause controversy?’

  ‘I don’t know, because some people are big supporters of the patriarchy,’ I say loudly.

  ‘So is Dr Who still your favourite programme?’

  ‘No, that’s reserved for Dark Energy – it was probably on TV just before you lost your memory, but you didn’t watch it.’

  I’m about to launch into the premise of the show but I stop myself. I can’t keep reminding him of how little I’ve changed since I was teenager.

  The waitress unceremoniously plonks our drinks down on the table before wiping her wet hands on the apron that’s appeared around her waist.

  ‘Have you chosen what you want?’ she says, her accent appearing stronger.

  ‘Actually, we haven’t really looked at the menu yet,’ I say with an apologetic wince.

  She tuts and turns on her heel.

  ‘Did she just tut?’ I say, looking at Max for clarification.

  ‘Uh-huh. It’s not like she’s rushed off her feet. You’d think that we’d be doing her a favour giving her something to do.’ He pulls a face. ‘Right then, I guess I’d better look. What did you say I went for last time? Steak frites?’

  ‘It’s always a classic,’ I nod. ‘I think I had the mussels and they were surprisingly good, but I’m not supposed to have shellfish, so I might go for the bourguignon. It’s the closest I can get to wine for the moment.’

  ‘Do you miss it?’

  I look at the bottle of red on the table next to us.

  ‘I do and I don’t. Sometimes more out of habit than anything, if everyone else has got a glass, but I guess we haven’t really been on the booze much since having Sasha.’

  Max sips his beer.

  ‘I think after Wednesday’s escapades, and how rough I’ve felt since, that’s probably not a bad thing.’

  The waitress is back and she’s tapping her neat little shoes and arching an eyebrow to the sky.

  ‘I’d like the chèvre chaud pour l’entree et le steak frites pour the main, s’il vous plait,’ says Max in clunky Franglais. The waitress doesn’t look impressed at his attempted effort.

  ‘How would you like your steak cooked?’

  ‘Medium-rare,’ says Max, closing his menu.

  ‘And I’ll just have the beef bourguignon, no starter.’

  The waitress snatches the menus back and hurries off.

  ‘Service with a smile, huh?’ says Max.

  ‘I know, and after you went to such lengths to practise your French. You usually just stick to “can I have a beer, please.”’

  ‘Always the first thing you should master in any language.’

  ‘Obviously,’ I say, sipping my fizzy water. A noisy jingle sounds from the door and another couple walks in, doing a double take when they see how empty it is. The waitress walks over, grabbing the same menus that we had, and starts heading in our direction. She points at the table next to us.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ I mutter under my breath. All I wanted was one romantic evening, just the two of us, not six of us all cosied up.

  Max looks up and the woman from the couple smiles as she sits down.

  ‘Cosy, huh,’ she says, beaming back.

  The waitress hands them their menus and slouches off.

  ‘It’s our anniversary,’ says the woman.

  ‘Nine years,’ says her husband, beaming like his wife.

  ‘How about you?’ asks the woman as she puts her napkin on her lap.

  ‘It’s our anniversary too,’ says Max, and the couple’s faces light up.

  ‘How long?’

  ‘One week,’ says Max with a smile.

  I laugh into my fizzy water that I pretend to sip.

  ‘To this time last week, then,’ she says, obviously thinking that Max is joking.

  ‘This time last week I was in A&E,’ he says.

  ‘Long story,’ I say, turning back to Max. This is not quite what I had in mind for our evening. I think ahead to the next date that I’ve thought about organising. I can’t keep leaving Sasha with Judy and Mick, so next time I’m going to bring her along. ‘I spoke to Rach today about the festival she and Gaby are off to next week; we’d been talking about going with them.’

  That’s not a total lie; whilst Max was leaning towards a no, on the day of his memory loss he’d said that we’d chat to Rach about it.

  ‘We just love festivals,’ says the woman, overhearing. ‘Don’t we, Howard? We went to Glastonbury this year for third time!’

  ‘Wonderful,’ I say, turning and pulling my best-good-for-you-but-please-stay-out-of-our-conversation face. I feel terrible as usually I’m quite friendly, but tonight I just want it to be all about Max and me. Luckily, the waitress goes over to their table and they start chatting to her.

  ‘A festival,’ says Max. ‘What, like in a tent?’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ I say. ‘And it’s family-friendly so we can take Sasha.’

  ‘To a festival? In a tent?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’ This was where I started to lose Max originally. ‘I was thinking of inviting Owen and Claire.’

  ‘That would be good. Daniel thought it would be good to keep seeing friends, to fill in the gaps of my missing year.’

  It takes me a second to remember that Daniel is the psychotherapist.

  ‘Great, that’s settled then. So, what’s all this about the missing year?’

  ‘Hmm, well, you’ve done a great job for the last four, but it would be good to find out more about that first year. Did I ever talk about it with you?’

  I can’t obviously tell him about his parents; it’s not my place.

  ‘A little. You had another girlfriend before me – well, quite a bit before me, as in I wasn’t a rebound, or anything,’ I say, hating myself for feeling the need to clarify it as now it makes it sound like I was.

  ‘Right,’ he says. ‘Was I with her long?’

  ‘I think you were only together a few months before she moved abroad.’

  ‘Well, maybe I should talk to her; she might be able to help fill in some blanks.’

  ‘I don’t know all the details but I got the impression that you didn’t keep in touch.’

  ‘So, it ended badly then?’ he says, wincing.

  ‘You never really told me about her, so I don’t know. Perhaps Owen might know more,’ I say with a shrug.

  ‘That’s a good idea. I’d like to get a full picture of what happened.’

  I try not to laugh. It’ll be Owen’s turn for an interrogation soon.

  ‘Of course, the more you know, the more you might remember.’

  ‘Exactly. Right, I’ll ask him. It would be good to see him and Claire anyway. Even if it is weird seeing him with someone other than Sarah.’

  ‘I know, I thought that too, even though I really like Claire.’

  ‘Yeah, she seemed really nice. But Sarah’s become a mate over the years. Do we still see her?’

  ‘I still message her occasionally, but we haven’t had her down to the new house yet. I think you feel disloyal to Owen or something.’

  ‘It’s always tricky when people break up.’

  The chatty couple next to us start howling with laughter with the waitress, and it makes me wonder why she’s such fun with them and so cold with us.

  ‘So, you said on the way that last time we ate here we talked a lot about what we wanted in the future,’ says Max.

  ‘Yes.’ I nod and brace myself for further i
nterrogation. ‘We were at that corny stage of dating; you know we’d already found out lots about each other and were talking more about hopes and dreams. Where we thought you’d be in five years’ time, you know, that kind of thing.’

  I reach forward and take a sip from my glass of water.

  ‘And I’m guessing you didn’t see yourself in five years’ time being married to someone who couldn’t remember you.’

  ‘Ha, no, funnily enough. Even in my wildest of dreams that night I’d never imagined it would work out between us the way it has and that we’d end up married.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yeah, I guess it took me some time to believe it would work out. You know that I had a bit of a crush on you when we were at school.’ He looks a little sheepish. ‘Don’t worry, you’ve told me before that you knew.’

  ‘It was quite obvious sometimes,’ he says, smiling.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I say, thinking of the times that I’d suddenly need to ‘go to the toilet’ just as he was leaving the bathroom after a shower, so that I could see him for a split second in just a towel, or sometimes I’d like to go into the steamed-up room after him and deeply inhale the smell of his Lynx bodywash. I cringe; teenage crushes were brutal.

  ‘But that doesn’t explain why you thought it wouldn’t work out?’

  ‘I guess I couldn’t believe that you would actually choose to go out with me.’

  ‘And I take it that wore off pretty quickly when you realised I was all smoke and mirrors,’ he says, laughing.

  I laugh along even though sometimes I’m still pinching myself when I think that I’m with Max Voss.

  ‘So where did you say you’d see yourself in five years’ time?’ he asks.

  ‘I think I said something clichéd like taking a sabbatical and travelling around the world.’

  ‘Did you ever do a gap year?’

  ‘No, I went straight to uni thinking I’d do one afterwards and then I ended up getting onto a graduate scheme and didn’t quite have the chance. I wish I had, though, looking back now. It’s hard when you’re young, isn’t it? You think to yourself that you have your whole life stretched out in front of you, but you don’t realise how quickly it can start to slip through your fingers the more the years tick by.’

  ‘Yeah, my years are racing by. Five years literally flew by in what felt like a minute.’