The Love Market

by Carol Mason

  I’m gutted by him saying “doomed”. Followed by the fact that he’s just admitted I’d be a responsibility. I’ve never felt like someone’s responsibility before and it just feels like another way of calling me a burden. ‘But surely the difference is that you love me and you know we are meant for each other—we have to be, don’t we? After all this. Whereas you didn’t feel that with her.’

  It kills me that he doesn’t instantly agree. He seems to give it too much thought, then says, ‘I’m not sure that is the difference. I think it’s more about putting too much pressure on the situation. Too much pressure on me to make it work out.’

  Too much pressure on him?

  He watches me as I clamber over him. ‘What are you doing?’

  I pull on my knickers and a sweater. ‘I need air.’

  ‘I’m just trying to be honest with you...’

  I am already outside, taking a deep breath, refusing to cry. And of course he’s right. I couldn’t drag Aimee away from Mike. Never. So why am I reacting this way?

  He doesn’t instantly follow. I sit on the sundeck and stare at the moon, which appears to be suspended by invisible cords on the top of the water, wishing I could undo his words. A thought goes through my head. I want the impossible. That’s my trouble. I always did.

  Then he’s standing behind me. He watches me for ages but I won’t look at him. There is nothing to say. ‘I didn’t mean it like that. I would love to promise you that we can do this, and it will all work out.’ He sits down beside me, gazes at my profile. I won’t look at him. ‘I have no doubt in my mind that if we’d both lived in the same country—in the same place—it would work out. Not a doubt. But…’ He gives up explaining.

  We stay like this for a while, sitting beside one another, not saying anything, just processing all that has been said. Then he stands up, looks down at me for a few moments, then says, ‘Will you come back to bed?’

  We go back inside. Back to bed. Patrick holds me, but it no longer feels the same.

  ~ * * * ~

  Something is gone from the holiday. Even Aimee senses it. She draws and colours-in quietly. Quite a collection of shoes she’s got now. I wonder if she’ll tire of shoes the second we’re on the plane then she’ll want to start painting waves again, with her granddad. By the time we’re back in Toronto, and I am packing our bags in Patrick’s apartment, a part of me can’t wait to get on that plane.

  I remember my father saying something to me once, recently. That for him it was always the thrill of the chase. ‘You can chase dreams as well as people,’ he said. ‘The dreams are usually better.’

  Driving to the airport, it feels like a long time since we were here nine days ago, maybe because we’ve done so much. Aimee stares out of the back window but with less of a curiosity about Canada than she had when we arrived, her travel bug now satisfied. Patrick and I say very little in the car. In fact, so little that he ends up switching the radio on to fill the silence.

  When the girl at the check-in desk asks me my destination, I find myself saying, ‘Newcastle,’ a little too affirmatively.

  ‘Look, do you want to grab a coffee before you go through security?’ he asks, something urgent in him—an urgency, almost, to change the way things seem to be now.

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘Best not.’

  ‘Hey,’ he kisses my downturned lips, as Aimee trots off to the toilet. He lifts up my chin with his index finger, so I have no choice but to look in his eyes. His face is drawn, and as handsome as ever. ‘I’m not giving up on us, Celine. You might, but I’m not.’

  ‘I’m not either,’ I lie, brightly.

  When Aimee comes back from the toilet, Patrick reaches a hand to the top of her head. ‘Thanks…’ she says, and smiles. ‘I’ve had a really nice time. It’s been really great.’

  ‘You’ve been lovely to us,’ I tell him. ‘You couldn’t have handled us better, or given us a better time.’ I smile. ‘We won’t ever forget Canada.’ My eyes are telling him so much more, but if I say any more I’m going to cry.

  His intense dark eyes look so damned sad. He kisses me again, as I fight back tears. Handing over our passports before we go through the security gate, takes me back to years ago, to leaving Vietnam. Only he wasn’t there to look at. He’d already gone. A part of me felt I’d dreamt him, and I could still be dreaming him.

  Before we disappear, I turn and look at him and he holds up his hand in a wave. And I take a mental picture of him, knowing I probably won’t ever see him again.

  Thirty-Nine

  I never imagined that I’d find myself celebrating my sister leaving me. But here I am, on this early September day, along with twenty-two other close family and friends, at Blackfriar’s restaurant in Newcastle. It also happens to be her 33rd birthday. My eyes move on a continuous loop from Aimee beside me, to my sister at the head of the long medieval table, to the suckling pig on my plate, and the monks and buxom wenches serving us, to Mike and Jennifer, to my father and Anthea, who has brownish lipstick on today.

  Mike keeps catching my eye across the table. And then we both sharply look away.

  Jennifer has tiny hands, like a child’s. Her emerald green jumper stretches snuggly over her big boobs. Mike has an arm draped over the back of her chair. Whenever Jennifer talks to me, I feel Mike’s eyes on me again. Just as I’m about to ask her how she made out with her pitch to the Director of Sales for National Express East Coast, Jacqui chinks the edge of her wine glass.

  Jacqui has noticeably lost weight since leaving Rich. In a clingy dark brown wool dress to mark the sudden significant turn into autumn, her chest looks bigger, her waist smaller, her hair somehow shinier, and her eyes even more luminous. But sitting here appraising her, I wish so much that she wasn’t going that I just want to got and hide behind coats in the cupboard and cry.

  ‘I’m standing here and I’m still rocking on both feet, it’s been such a whirlwind from my applying for the job, to the interview, to my hearing I’d got it. Then the trips down to London to find a flat.’ She swipes a hand across her brow, ‘Phew! But I’m excited! This is what I haven’t felt in a long time. About anything. But it certainly does feel good.’

  Her gaze swings itself past me, taking everybody in, including a couple of her friends whom she hesitated before inviting: friends who weren’t so supportive about her leaving Rich. ‘In getting here I’ve had to recently make a lot of very tough decisions in my personal life. Ones that some people maybe still don’t understand,’ she pointedly looks at the naysayers. ‘But believe me I have lost sleep over it all, as I take my actions very seriously. Much as I’m excited to move to London, and much as I tell myself I’ll be back up here every weekend, and nothing’s really going to change, I also know that a lot is.’ Her gaze slides to me. ‘The one thing I would love to be able to do, and know I can’t do, is put Celine in a bag and bring her with me, with Aimee.’ She smiles, and her eyes fill. ‘Because I’m going to have to find somebody else to drop in on at all hours of the night, somebody else to pop for a pint with on the spur of the moment, somebody else’s personal crises to balance out my own, and absolutely no one is going to measure up! When I’ve needed a friend, there’s not one I could imagine unloading on in quite the same way as I have done to Celine. To me, the fact that we don’t actually come from the same parents was just an accident of birth.’ She wipes a tear. Then she picks up her wine glass and raises it, surveying the table again. ‘I just want you to know that you’re all welcome in my new flat in Hammersmith. Only not all at the same time, as it’s only a fraction bigger than my car.’

  She flops back down in her chair and some of her friends whoop up applause, and my eyes go over to Mike’s only to find him watching me again. We hold eyes for a few moments. Then I try a smile and he matches it for effort.

  ~ * * * ~

  Aimee and I start planning the Love Market’s party, which we have now changed from Christmas to New Year’s Eve. As soon as I told her it was a masked ball, Aimee thought
it grandly exciting, and wanted in on all the preparations. I thought I’d put her artistic leanings to good use and I’ve got her started designing the invitation.

  ‘Doesn’t one of your rich clients own a big castle or something?’ she says, when I bemoan the fact that so many of the good venues around town are already booked up. If only I’d thought of the party idea sooner.

  The penny drops. ‘Gosh! Yes! David Hall, the man who doesn’t wear underwear owns the spectacularly fabulous Strickley House!’ I had the pleasure to visit it once, and felt like I’d died and been born as royalty. After Kim dumped him—apparently she never saw his house, and I often wonder that if she had, things might have been different—I set him up with Paula Nicholson, a forty-three-year-old wedding photographer who was the granddaughter of the chauffeur to the Duke of Northumberland. I don’t know why, but I thought the connection was neat. Plus, when she’s not shooting a wedding, she has a thing for artistically capturing stately homes and castles. She had an exhibition of her photography a few months go, in Newcastle. I went to see it, and contemplated inviting my father. But only briefly.

  So far her relationship with David Hall seems to be going well. ‘Well, it’s a long shot but I could try to find a way to tactfully tell him that I am desperately seeking a venue for the party—to which he is, of course, invited.’

  Aimee scowls. ‘Why doesn’t he wear underwear?’

  ~ * * * ~

  Patrick wants us to go there for Christmas.

  Even though we’re only in September, he says he wanted to plant the seed early. But my head feels like it’s spinning, given that we’ve really only just got back from Canada. Contemplating another trip is… Impractical.

  Me, who has craved more adventure in my life, doesn’t know what to do with it when I get it. I pace in front of our window, staring out at the rain over the misty moors, holding the phone. Then I tell him all the reasons why I don’t think we can come. Aimee will want to see her dad over Christmas. Obviously. I have the party, and the invitations are about to go out. So there will be a tonne of things to do. No one likes travelling in the winter.

  ‘I miss you,’ he says, cutting me off. ‘At least in the summer I had your visit to look forward to. No I don’t know when I’m going to get to see you.’

  ‘Maybe Easter,’ I tell him, feeling defeated by the logistics of a long distance relationship. Yes they can work. If they are a means to an end. Not if they are an end in themselves. ‘How’s your book?’ I try to change the subject.

  ‘I can’t focus.’

  ‘Are you looking forward to starting your job?’

  ‘No.’

  It’s not fair that he loves me, I think. The Beatles were wrong. Love isn’t all you need.

  ‘Hey,’ he says, brighter. ‘I was looking up long distance relationships on the Internet. We should go on a date.’

  ‘Date?’

  ‘What we do is, we pick a time. We both make the same meal. We buy the same bottle of wine. Then we rent the same movie and watch it at the same time.’

  I find myself smiling. ‘What? And then let me guess, when the movie is over, we have phone sex?’

  ‘No I think we’re supposed to do that while we’re making the spaghetti. With no clothes on.’

  I chuckle. I love the way he makes a light come on again, when everything seemed dark. ‘Somehow I can’t picture us doing that at all.’

  ‘Me neither,’ he says. ‘I think that would just make me lonelier than I already am.’

  Forty

  I spend all day Wednesday putting together some preliminary plans: phoning caterers, contacting a client who is an event planner, for a DJ recommendation, researching costumes. I find a site on the Internet that sells exclusive, hand-made ostrich feather masks that Aimee’s going to love. Then I suddenly think, well, hang on, we can put feather boas in vases instead of flowers. It’ll be fun and far cheaper.

  David Hall agreed to loan me his house. Well, part of it. He said it was the least he could do—given that I’d introduced him to someone he was falling for—plus, he said, the house has needed a party for a long time.

  I went over there and saw the room that he thinks we should have it in. Now I have the whole place envisioned: a couple of chrome martini bars decked in silver tulle, and strung with sliver and gold mini lights, nests of silver Christmas balls on high-top tables, silver candelabra, silver and gold tableware—I must find out where to rent it. And it might be fun to kick things off with a dance lesson! I’ll invite an instructor to teach everyone the Viennese waltz. Or should I do the merengue? Perhaps the waltz will be more original. Plus, it encourages intimate contact.

  I am so busy scribbling notes as ideas come to me that I almost forget I promised to take my dad out for afternoon tea.

  He is already seated, in Lovejoy’s Tea Room, in the village, when I get there. I watch him for a moment or two, as he sits there unaware of me. His square military shoulders in his best navy blazer. His spectacular, snow-white hair. I try to imagine if I had no parents left, and I can’t.

  ‘Sandra is going to sit for me,’ he says.

  I groan. I lay down the small menu card as I already know I’m having the clotted cream scones, like I had last time I brought him here. Then I smile at him.

  “She walks in Beauty, like the night

  Of cloudless climes and starry skies

  And all that’s best of dark and bright

  Meet in her aspect and her eyes.”

  I quote this to him. I don’t know why.

  ‘Lord Byron,’ he says.

  ‘I remember you reciting it to me when I was little. I must have only been about four or five.’ I also remember asking him to paint me. And he never would. He said he didn’t paint any more. And when I pressed him he got angry. It hurt. I thought that if he loved me, he would have wanted to. Or maybe I wasn’t pretty enough.

  He nods. ‘You were. Just a little girl.’

  I notice he’s wearing one of his cufflink shirts—his best shirt, for the high-tea-ness of the occasion. ‘I’ve always remembered those lines for some reason,’ I tell him.

  ‘She phoned me after I wrote to her,’ he says, back on Sandra. ‘She wants me to draw her nude.’

  ‘Will there be a nurse present?’

  He scratches the edge of his David Niven moustache. ‘Who for? For me or for her?’

  We titter. ‘How do you manage it, Dad?’ I ask him.

  ‘Manage?’ He looks around for the waitress, impatient to get his scones, having acquired a sweet tooth with age. Then he just smiles.

  “So, we'll go no more a roving

  So late into the night,

  Though the heart be still as loving,

  And the moon be still as bright.

  For the sword outwears its sheath,

  And the soul wears out the breast,

  And the heart must pause to breathe,

  And love itself have rest.

  Though the night was made for loving,

  And the days return too soon,

  Yet we'll go no more a roving

  By the light of the moon.”

  The middle-aged waitress has arrived and stands there, in her white frilly apron, entranced, until my dad finishes. He orders for us, makes a slow assessment of her legs as she walks away. ‘It’s about age conquering the restlessness of youth,’ he says, of the poem. ‘Byron of course made me look like a saint. You know his half sister bore a child by him…. The day I stop being in love, and believing in love, is the day I know it’s time to die.’

  I’m not sure if that last bit is my dad talking, or Byron, but it makes me melancholy.

  He looks around the small room with its ten or so tables taken up with those of us who still appreciate loose leaf tea, pectin-free jam, and the smell of baked goods cooling on a rack. ‘I’m just saying that age and time, and living and life are supposed to dull those senses and desires but sometimes, for some, they don’t. And they never did for me.’

  ‘
Are you talking about Anthea?’

  He looks at me disapprovingly. ‘Anthea needs companionship. I light up her life.’

  I beam a smile at his egotism. ‘Anthea isn’t your true love then?’

  ‘Jacqui is my true love.’ My sister’s name lingers there. ‘I miss her,’ he says. ‘Every time I look at that woman a part of me blazes like a forest on fire.’

  ‘I miss her too,’ I tell him. My dad’s declarations about Jacqui get more grandiose every time.

  ‘Do you miss Patrick?’ He looks at me quizzically.

  Before I can answer he says, ‘There are two kinds of people, Celine: romantics, and everyone else. Romantics will never truly be happy, and yet they know a fuller happiness than others. It’s a blessing and a curse.’

  ‘I’m not sure if Patrick is a romantic.’

  ‘Well, romantics always think they want to be with someone just like them. But in reality it doesn’t work.’

  ‘What was my mother?’

  ‘She was you.’

  I widen my eyes at him.

  ‘Much as you don’t see it or want to believe it. You think you’re not like her because she was bitter and you aren’t. But she had reason to be, and you don’t.’

  ‘But I’m not a negative person like she was.’

  ‘She couldn’t let go, and it made her negative. When you’re a romantic, and you’re in love with someone to such an exalted degree, and then that love starts to fade, the natural instinct is to devalue everything that comes after it. Then as though in some cruel turn of fate what you are left with is far worse than what you would have had if you hadn’t met them. You are exactly like her. You hold on to your vision of how you want things to be, instead of accepting how they are. That’s how you marriage failed.’