The Love Market

by Carol Mason

  ~ * * * ~

  ‘There isn’t a good time,’ Jacqui says, when I ring her. ‘I’m extremely busy at work. I don’t think I can do it, Celine.’

  I park on the edge of my settee cushion, and stare at the space between my feet. ‘You know, stop me and tell me I’m wrong any time, but I’m getting the impression you don’t want to help me out with this.’

  Silence. Then, ‘I don’t want to be involved in the article, Celine, if you must know.’

  I pluck at the threads on my cut off jean shorts—the ones Aimee made me buy because she said I needed to be trendier. ‘But you are the article—I mean, part of it. The whole angle for the story was how there are two matchmakers in the family. Remember? Without you, Patrick wouldn’t be back in my life and the journalist wouldn’t be wanting to write about me.’

  She sighs heavily. I am so confused by her reaction that I have a headache. ‘I just don’t get it. I don’t know why you’re being like this.’

  ‘Because it’s not me they should be interviewing!’ she suddenly says, sounding exasperated. ‘I didn’t want to tell you this, Celine. But now I’ve obviously got no choice, have I?’ She sighs again while I hang there in suspense.

  ‘It wasn’t me who got you back in touch with Patrick. It was Mike.’

  Thirty-Six

  ‘Mike?’

  I laugh, a short burst. Then I’m struck dumb. ‘Did you say it was Mike?’ I say, after a few moments.

  ‘Yes. Mike emailed Patrick. I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to tell you. That’s why I let you just go on believing it was me.’

  ‘Hang on… Are you being serious?’ I contemplate this. ‘My God, you are! Mike emailed Patrick? But the email was sent from my computer. Mike never…’

  ‘Had access? Yes he did. When you went to Manchester and he came over. Remember?’

  The confusion lifts, and I do remember, vaguely. Didn’t he tell me that he took them out to dinner?

  ‘He came to pick us up. I invited him in because he was a bit early and Aimee had been having a clothing crisis, and she wasn’t quite ready. He was downstairs. I was upstairs with Aimee, helping her choose something. I suppose he must have gone on your computer…’

  ‘Why on earth would he do that, Jacq? He’s got no right…!’ I stand up and walk around the room, in disbelief. ‘So—hang on—he knows that Patrick and I met? That he’s been up here? That he’s been in our house?’

  ‘Not from me he doesn’t,’ she says quickly. ‘When he told me that he’d emailed he said he didn’t want to know anything about what might happen. He’d just done it and that was it.’

  ‘But why would he even tell you?’

  ‘I don’t know. Maybe like all of us, we need someone to tell. Or maybe it was his way of telling me why he believed your marriage broke up—because there was someone else in the background. Who knows? Anyway, he said it quite matter-of-factly. Didn’t make a big thing of it. It was the first time I’d ever heard Patrick’s name come out of Mike’s mouth, but the way he told me, it was obvious he knew that I knew all about him. I’m sure he knew we’ve talked about him many times. I’m sure Mike knew a lot more than you ever gave him credit for.’

  I am stunned.

  ‘But if I were a betting woman,’ she continues, ‘I’d say that he probably suspects that’s why you went to London, yes.’

  I look at Mike’s photo on the shelf above the table. His eyes again, watching me. Was this Mike’s grand plan? To leave me and then reunite me with the one he thought I loved more?

  ‘Why would he do it, Jacq?’ I say again. ‘I just don’t get it.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She sounds equally dismayed. ‘I suppose you’ll have to ask him.’

  ~ * * * ~

  I arrange to meet Mike in the pub, at the far end of Tyne Green Park. To get him to come, I told him I need to talk to him about Aimee. It’s a dark day but dry when I set out. But by the time I am half way along the riverside trail it starts throwing it down. In my haste to leave the house, I didn’t bring an umbrella. Hurrying, my flipflops make small noises like trapped birds. Within moments my toes are caked in muck, and my white dirndl skirt soaked. My mobile rings.

  ‘Where are you?’ he says. ‘I’m at the pub and you’re not.’

  ‘I’m nearly there,’ I tell him. ‘I decided to walk instead of drive. But I didn’t bring a brolly.’ I push back hair that’s dripping styling product into my eyes. I usually run this park, so have no perception of the time it takes to actually just walk it. For some odd reason I remember Aimee getting lost in here when I brought her, when she was about five. One minute she was there, then I bumped into a neighbour and got chatting, and when I looked, she was gone. I can still remember my feet pounding the grass, my heart hammering, like I was going to die; my head dizzy from dodging trees and trying to watch my step. How I was calling for her, and thinking what if I can’t find her? If she just disappears? If someone takes her? Then, completely unexpectedly, Mike came round the corner with her in his arms. He had decided, on the spur of the moment, to come out and join us.

  ‘I’ll come and meet you,’ he says now.

  ‘No, stay there. I’m not far. There’s no sense in us both getting wet,’ I say, but he has already hung up.

  I start running. My clothes are stuck to my body now, and I am cold. Nothing like you would expect to feel in mid-summer. Only in this part of the country where the dampness cuts through when the sun isn’t there to lift it. I stop to wipe my smarting eyes, wondering how I’m ever going to go into the pub looking such a mess.

  When I stop rubbing my eyes and open them again, Mike is standing right there, about fifty feet away, on the gravel path. A lone figure, against a background of tall trees, cold river, and iron rain.

  He has on his light blue skinny jeans, with his white running shoes, and his old beige blazer thrown on top of a white open-necked dress shirt, that he hasn’t bothered tucking in, as though he threw it on quickly. He is holding his big black Blaze FM umbrella.

  ‘Hiya,’ he says. ‘God, you’re drenched. Look at you!’

  As I walk up to him, my breath coming hard from running, his eyes drop down the front of me, then he holds out his umbrella for me to come under.

  I take a step or two closer, so I am sheltered. The rain does an irregular tiptoe on the nylon above our heads. He looks pale, and traumatized somehow. His eyes comb over my dripping wet hair, over my face. He smells of fresh air. There are beads of rain in the quiff of his hair.

  ‘Mike,’ I say, hugging my arms about my body.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.

  I can’t go on for a few moments, have to look away from him. A family of starlings fly back and forth between two trees. There is gravel in my flipflops, small stones sticking to the soles of my feet. ‘Why did you email Patrick?’ I look at him now.

  His expression doesn’t change much. But in the darkness of his face, I suddenly see him, as maybe I never have: as someone easily hurt. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘So she told you.’ He nods. ‘Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.’

  ‘She did. But not for the reasons you might think.’ I don’t feel like getting into the magazine article thing now. I am shivering and crave to be dry and warm. ‘But why Mike? What on earth made you do it?’

  The rain is pelting now on top of the umbrella. It seems to slide down in sheets, riddling the calm grey surface of the river like a hail of bullets. He doesn’t speak for what feels like a very long time, almost looking through the rain as it comes down around us. ‘You and I didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to be happy.’

  He meets my eyes now, and the bareness of his honesty makes my eyes brim tears.

  ‘What is it they say? If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you always got? I knew you’d go on wondering about him, and doing nothing about it. So I decided to do it for you.’

  The tears roll hotly down my face, now. They’re bolstered by a sob. I don’t mean to cry—don
’t even know why I am crying. Mike watches me without huge pity. Then he balances his umbrella handle in the crook of his arm and wiggles his jacket off, gives it to me. ‘Here. Take it.’

  I pull it around me. It’s warm from his body. ‘Don’t feel bad,’ he says. ‘It’s not your fault any more than it’s mine. You tried to make it work, I know that.’ He studies me wistfully. ‘You couldn’t help being in love with somebody else any more than I could help being in love with you. We’re both people who tend to reach for things that are somehow a bit far out of our grasp.’

  It takes me a while to be able to speak because I’m ashamed that I must have allowed my state of mind to be so obvious all those years. ‘Did you really always think I wanted to be with him all the time that I was with you? Because that’s not true, Mike.’

  ‘No—maybe not all the time. But enough of the time. I think you wished I’d been him. You had this ongoing thing for him. Most people would have snapped out of it, but you never did.’ He pulls a resigned smile. ‘I actually happen to think our marriage was a lot better than what you made it out to be in your own mind. But I suppose I always knew something was wrong, deep down. That you weren’t really happy.’ His face has flushed now. His hair flattened with the dampness. ‘Most people don’t have these outbursts do they? Where they tell their husbands that they’re not happy. Maybe once, or twice. But I heard this for years, Celine. Years. The same rant.’ His expression seems to blanch with sadness. ‘For a long time I thought that if I was good to you in all the right ways I could change that. But then, well, I had to take the blinders off eventually, didn’t I?’

  I look at this man standing here in the rain, this human being who I happened to meet quite by random when I least expected to meet anyone I could ever care about again. This man who knows more about me, in more specific and intimate ways than any other living soul: more than my mother ever did, more than my father, my daughter or my sister—certainly more than Patrick. What was the point of it all? What’s he going to do with all this knowledge and understanding he has acquired of me now? Wasn’t it just a wasted education in another human being? If our marriage had been a mistake, then it should have ended earlier, before there was that expectation that the longer it went on, the longer it would go on. It’s like putting yourself through training and entering a race you have no hope of winning.

  ‘I’m so sorry Mike,’ I look at his lean shoulders under the shirt. The goose-bumps on his neck. His chest hair poking out; I remember how I would lie and nestle into it, in bed. ‘It’s not enough. But I am.’ My voice breaks.

  I bow my head and sense his eyes burning into it. When he speaks, his voice bears this heaviness of heart, with the faintest hint of reproach, which I can tell he is suppressing. ‘You know, it would hurt me so much to think that you never found what you were looking for. And who knows, maybe you and this bloke were right for each other. If you’ve gone on wanting him all this time… Just because you hardly knew him… I feel like I’ve known you all my life and that didn’t exactly help us, did it?’

  I grasp myself around the waist, as though I am caving in on myself. I look at him, then can’t look at him. Because his composure is almost unbearable.

  And still we stand here, and the rain pounds around us. Neither one of us suggests continuing this conversation inside the pub. ‘I didn’t plan to email him, you know,’ he says. ‘Then I was over at yours, while you were away, and for some reason—I don’t know why, your computer was there and I decided to check something on the Internet, while I was waiting for them to get ready. Whatever I typed in, there was a list came up of pages last visited. And I saw his name right there—his email address at some college.’ He shrugs. ‘I have no idea what made me do it. I just thought put it out there, see what happens. If he bites, he bites.’ He laughs a little, humourlessly, when he sees what must be a stunned look on my face. ‘I didn’t exactly want to say anything to him, so I just fired off a blank email, and that was it…’

  ‘You know he came to London,’ I eventually say, as we start walking in the direction of his car.

  I glance at him and see his cheeks flush: that look I know so well: the Mike slightly pissed off look. ‘I guessed. But I’m really not interested. In fact, it’s the last thing I want to hear about.’ He looks right into my eyes and we stop walking again. ‘I hope it works out for you. But do I have any desire to know anything about him?’ He shrugs. ‘Nothing.’

  I look away, staring across the river until my eyes burn. ‘Don’t cry,’ he says quietly. ‘You should be happy. You can have what you always wanted. How many people are in that position? Eh?’ He says it without a note of bitterness.

  ‘But what if—?’ We meet eyes, and I am willing the tears not to fall. ‘Mike, what if there’s been a mistake?’ I find myself whispering.

  His eyes scope my face again, and I can see the disarray of him: like a person wrestling with the desire to believe in something that he just can’t. ‘There’s no such thing as mistakes, Celine. Only choices.’

  His tightens his grasp on the umbrella handle, while he watches more tears spring in my eyes. ‘You have to think of us as a season,’ he says. ‘We came to an end, but life moves on.’

  And then something odd occurs. While he is studying me, there is a moment where his expression changes, and I see in his face a look that used to be there years ago, back when he still believed in us. He smiles now—a sad smile. Then our faces move in at the same time; two people thinking the same thought. Before we touch, we pause, as though confirming permission. His hand goes to my waist, the umbrella faltering overhead, his fingers sinking into my wet cardigan. Then we are kissing. At first, a tentative granting of lips meeting lips. Mike’s kiss feels new again, after Patrick’s. And it’s almost like all those years ago, in the car. A small flame fans somewhere inside me, drawing me irresistibly to its heat, but just bobbing slightly out of reach the closer I get and the more his mouth intensifies on mine.

  The umbrella drops out his hand, and bobs onto the ground. The rain now is like needles on our heads. Mike’s intense grip on my waist, fingers moving firmly to a rhythm. And still our mouths move together, his hands relocating to the buttons of my cardigan now. I freeze, almost. Intrigued by what he’s going to do, and, inside, a part of me just going with it. Then the momentum of our kiss picks up again, as he undoes three buttons from the bottom, until he is able to get in there and find bare flesh. Mike’s touch has a breathtaking effect. Or maybe the charge in me is partly shock: these same hands that have been on my body so many times that I’d allowed myself not to feel them. Now I feel them as though they are different hands.

  We are getting soaked, but he doesn’t seem to mind. His hair is plastered now to his head. All he does is hang onto chilled and bare waist while he finishes kissing me. He is the first to pull away. He smiles, thinly, more with his eyes than anything. Then his gaze doesn’t once move from mine as he tugs the sides of my cardigan back into place, and does up my buttons. Like you might wrap up a present that you’re going to re-gift.

  ‘Hmm,’ he says. Just Hmm.

  Thirty-Seven

  ‘You seem distant today,’ Jacqui looks at me quizzically as we sit devouring jacket potatoes and salad in a café in Eldon Square. I have to be in town to meet a potential new client this afternoon, and took this chance to have a bite with my sis.

  She studies my silence. ‘If you don’t have things to tell me, I have things to tell you,’ she says.

  I smile now. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Well,’ she draws a big breath. ‘I’m not going to marry Rich.’

  I set down my knife and fork, fold my arms and study her for a moment or two. ‘You’re not? Hang on, I’m too stunned to speak.’

  She laughs. ‘All right! So you knew. That’s why you’re in the business. Because you know things about people that they don’t know about themselves.’

  ‘In your case it hardly required supernormal powers.’

  ‘Maybe not… I s
uppose I’ve always known I couldn’t go through with it. The Christian thing—awful as it was—was a crush that had to happen, to make me see sense.’

  ‘Have you told Rich yet?’

  She nods, surprising me. ‘He took it quite well. I think he knew. He said half the time he felt we were room-mates anyway. He said he always thought it odd how I was happy to go out without him all the time, how I never really factored him into many of my plans…’ She rakes the flesh out of her potato, then unwraps a small patty of butter and scrapes it on there with a knife. I watch her draw it around the potato until it melts. ‘So we’re cancelling the holiday, and we’re going to sell the flat. But in the meantime,’ she looks at me now, ‘I have to move out and rent somewhere. But I wondered if I could move in with you, just for a month or so, because I’d like to take my time to look around.’

  ‘Of course. Aimee will be thrilled. You can stay as long as you like.’

  She blows me a kiss across the table, then eyes her potato again, as though she might not want to eat it any more. ‘There’s another reason, though, why I don’t want to go buying somewhere just yet.’ She looks up at me, with her chin tucked, sheepish. ‘I’ve actually applied for a job. To work for Sir Norman Foster, in London.’

  Now I really am floored. ‘In London?’ I gasp. Sir Norman Foster is the famous architect who designed Newcastle’s Sage Centre for Music. I know how much she admires his work.

  ‘There’s no guarantee I’ll get it. In fact, it’s highly unlikely, so I’m trying hard not to get too excited.’

  I scrutinize her. ‘Jacq, you graduated Uni with a first. Your current firm practically took your arm off to get you. I can’t imagine there’d me too many people more qualified.’

  ‘Oh, you’d be surprised. They’ll be fishing from a very big pool. There are lots more talented people out there than me.’

  ‘You know, I always sensed your restlessness was about more than just you fancying someone else,’ I tell her, dousing my own potato in butter now.