He’d told me they’d been separated for a long time but they weren’t divorced. I wanted to know more about why they’d split up but the right opportunity to ask never seemed to come up.
‘Look. I know this must be odd for you.’ Abe appeared to read my mind. ‘It is for me too. I know you’ve only recently lost your husband and I know I’m technically still married. I don’t want to do or say anything that makes you feel awkward or uncomfortable.’
‘But?’
‘I’m glad I met you. I’d like to see more of you. But if you’re not ready –’
‘I’d like to see more of you too,’ I interrupted. ‘But …’
‘But?’
‘I don’t want to rush into anything.’
‘I’m not asking you to. I’d just like to have lunch with you. Will you have lunch with me?’
‘I already said I’d like to, didn’t I?’
‘Yes, you did. But I worried I might be scaring you.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re not.’
A couple of lunches later, I was a little nervous that I’d invited him to my flat. I almost wished I’d invited him to breakfast rather than lunch. I wasn’t coping with the waiting. There’s only so much preparation you can do when you’ve decided to make chicken casserole with rice, not much tidying needed for a small flat that you live in on your own, only so many times you can look in the mirror and realize there’s nothing you can do about your appearance because that is what you look like.
But I couldn’t settle, couldn’t concentrate on anything, even though I had work to do.
I returned to the kitchen and glanced around for something to keep me busy. I went to the shelves above a cupboard, on which various plates and bowls were stacked and behind which the faces of friends and family, no longer with us, stared out, smiling and happy. That was where I propped up the funeral service cards, which seemed to be accumulating at an alarming rate. Was it morbid to leave them there? Would it be off-putting for Abe to sit in the kitchen with my late husband, my brother, a work colleague and a friend looking down at us from beyond the grave?
I stood on a stool, gathered them up and put them in a pile beneath my diary, feeling a little guilty about Richard’s. I traced the outline of his face. ‘I’ve not forgotten you, my love.’ I kept to myself the joyful thought that I was beginning to feel a sense of possibility again but I added, ‘You don’t mind, do you? My asking Abe for lunch?’
I knew that he wouldn’t. He’d said, not long before he died, ‘I hope you find someone else, Ivy. You deserve to be happy.’
Richard had deserved it too and I hope I made him happy, that what we’d had had been enough to sustain him in his final moments.
Why had I invited Abe to my flat? Partly because I wanted to bring someone there – hardly anyone ever came, and I wanted it to feel more like home. Partly because I wanted Abe to see where I lived, and partly because I thought it would be easier. There were things I wanted to ask him, which I thought it might be more natural for us to talk about in private, things I’d not felt able to ask him in a crowded restaurant.
I began to relax when he arrived.
‘These are for you.’ He handed me flowers, an arrangement in a jam-jar tied up with a bit of twine. ‘They’re from my garden.’
‘They’re lovely. Thank you. Shall I take your coat? And hat?’ He had in his hand a navy woollen cap, the kind I imagined Greek fishermen wore.
‘It was my dad’s,’ he said, as if the hat needed explaining. ‘There’s quite a chill today. Very autumnal.’
I caught him looking at a photograph on the wall, as I hung the hat and coat on the pegs behind the door. ‘That was in Cornwall, years ago.’
‘You look happy.’ Abe studied the picture of us all picnicking at the foot of sand dunes. Lottie couldn’t have been more than about eight and Max was still tiny.
‘We were.’ I allowed him to look for a moment longer, then said, ‘We’re in the kitchen.’ I walked down the hallway and let him follow me.
‘Something smells good.’ He looked around. ‘I’ve brought some wine. I didn’t know if you preferred white or red so I got a bottle of each.’ He fished in a bag and placed them on the kitchen table.
‘That’s very kind. And you shouldn’t have. Not as well as the flowers.’
‘You’ve made the lunch,’ he said. ‘Which would you prefer?’
‘I don’t mind.’
‘Red?’ he asked. ‘Shall I put the other in the fridge and you can have it another time?’ Abe came a step closer and put his hand on my arm. It was a gentle, reassuring gesture but I still felt anxious.
‘Red’s good,’ I said, laughing nervously. ‘I think I need a drink.’
‘Me too,’ he said. ‘I know there are probably a lot of things you want to ask me. Do you have a corkscrew?’
I took one from a drawer and handed it to him. ‘I’m not going to interrogate you,’ I said, as he took it and began removing the cork from the bottle.
‘But you want to know more about me.’ He pulled the cork and poured the wine. ‘I want to know more about you too. Here.’ He handed me a glass.
‘Thank you. Cheers.’
We took a sip.
‘Lunch will be about ten minutes.’
We sat at the kitchen table.
Some small talk. And then: ‘I don’t want to pry.’ I did. ‘But …’ How to phrase this without seeming presumptuous? ‘… I’d like to know more about your wife. Why you separated and …’
‘It’s not prying. You’re entitled to know. We separated for a number of reasons.’ He sipped his wine. ‘And I think we both have different point of views about what went wrong.’
‘What’s yours?’
‘It was partly the children growing up. They’d been so much the focus of our life together that when they no longer were we were a bit adrift.’
‘We felt a little of that.’
‘I’m sorry, Ivy. I know it must sound ungrateful, selfish even, ending a relationship I could have stayed in when you had no choice about yours.’
‘Maybe Richard and I would have found life more difficult, post children, if he’d lived longer. His cancer gave us another focus.’
‘That’s why it seems selfish, but after Ruby and Sam had left home, there just didn’t seem to be anything left of us.’
‘A lot of people feel like that.’
‘Lynn got pregnant quite soon after we met,’ he said. ‘We were thrown into family life almost before we really knew each other.’
‘Oh?’
‘It all happened very fast. Meeting each other, finding out we were going to be parents. We got married a few months before Ruby was born and a couple of years later we had Sam. And we were happy, really happy. The kids were fantastic. They’re wonderful children. We were a happy family, but you know what it’s like with young children.’
‘Yes.’
‘There’s very little time for you, as a couple. Lynn worked in television, long hours often, and I was absorbed in my job. The kids took the rest of our time, and when they grew up, we didn’t really know each other any more or how to be with each other.’
‘I’m just going to look at the rice.’ I stood up and moved to the cooker while Abe carried on talking.
‘I suppose that was when we should have begun making more time for each other, but I didn’t make the effort and I wish I had.’
‘So you just drifted apart?’ I was stirring the rice, my back to him.
‘I had an affair. I know you’ll think less of me now but I did and, unsurprisingly, created more distance between us.’
‘What happened?’ I turned the gas low and sat down again. ‘I mean how long did it last and how did Lynn find out?’
‘A couple of years.’ He drank some more wine and looked at me, then quickly away. Embarrassed? ‘I met the woman through work. I was very drawn to her. I can’t say it meant nothing because it did and she did. I loved her. I still loved Lynn and I was terrified of hurting her but at
the same time the other woman seemed to offer something else. Another life.’
‘You wanted to leave your wife?’
‘I thought about it and agonized about what to do, but in the end it wasn’t my decision.’
‘What happened?’
‘She finished it. The other woman. I’d talked about leaving Lynn. I don’t know if I actually would have done, if it had come to it, but I think it scared her.’
‘So she ended it before it went any further?’
‘Yes. I was devastated but relieved too. I didn’t have to worry about how much I’d hurt Lynn if I left her, and I was grateful to be spared that, but …’
‘She found out anyway?’
‘The irony is that I almost got away with it, although I know that sounds awful. But I also wonder if the circumstances that led to her finding out happened for a reason. Maybe we needed to end the marriage because by now neither of us was really happy in it.’
‘Go on.’
‘The other woman lived outside London. She travelled up for work and we met here most of the time but, on that occasion, she’d asked if I could meet her midway. She said she needed to talk, and she had to be at home that day. She had younger children. I went to meet her at a country pub about fifteen miles from where she lived. She suggested it. It was anonymous and not on her patch.’
‘And she told you it was over?’
‘Yes. I won’t go into details. We both knew really that it couldn’t go on for ever, not as it was, and she didn’t want to break up her family. I understood that, even though, if she’d felt differently, maybe I would have left Lynn.’
‘So you accepted her decision?’
‘I did. I was upset, of course. She was too, but she’d made up her mind. She said she had to stop seeing me.’
‘So what happened?’
‘On my way back there was an accident. A lorry carrying hay bales jack-knifed in the middle of the road and shed its load. I was a couple of cars behind. The ones in front of me braked, swerved, and there was a collision.’
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘Miraculously, no. The road wasn’t busy or it might have been worse. But the police were called and there was some issue with the lorry, with the way the hay had been secured. I was a witness to an accident. They needed my details.’
‘Of course.’
‘A week later, Lynn took a call from the police. The officer explained that I’d witnessed an accident and they wanted to take a statement. Of course I hadn’t told her – I should have been at my office that afternoon.’
‘So it all came out?’
‘Yes. In the worst possible way. Lynn was devastated. I was too. But I had no right to feel sorry for myself. It was a terrible time.’
‘I can imagine.’
‘We had counselling. We tried to make a go of our marriage. For a time, I thought we might pull through. But there were too many cracks to paper over.’
‘So you decided to separate?’
‘We were arguing, bickering, all the time. We couldn’t be nice to each other. Eventually I suggested I moved out, just to give us a break.’
‘And that was the beginning of the end?’
‘In a way, or maybe it was just the beginning of a different relationship between us. We got on better when we were living apart. We still see each other. We go to the theatre and meet for lunch. We’ve built a close friendship now that we’ve put the marriage aside.’
‘That’s good,’ I said, but I felt unnerved by it nevertheless.
‘Of course I regret that we couldn’t mend our marriage. I thought, given time, Lynn would be able to forgive me, to trust me again, but I don’t think she ever will.’
‘Do you still love her?’
‘Yes,’ he said simply, which was half what I wanted to hear and half what I didn’t. What sort of man would he be if he didn’t love someone he’d been married to for so long, the mother of his children?
But where exactly did that leave me?
‘She’ll always be the woman I was married to. She’ll always be the mother of my children, and she’ll always be my friend.’
‘Thank you,’ I said, and got to my feet to dish up the lunch.
‘What for?’
‘For telling me,’ I said, removing a pan from the hob and putting it on a trivet on the work-surface.
I couldn’t pretend I was happy about the situation, or that I might not have found it easier if he and his wife had fallen out so badly that they never spoke. Of course it was better that they were still friends, and I wasn’t surprised. It said more about him than if they’d split up acrimoniously. And I hadn’t known him long, had no idea how he thought of me or where our friendship was leading. But I knew that I really liked him, and that if it was leading anywhere, I’d find it more difficult than I might have if his wife was completely out of the picture.
‘Would you like some coffee?’ I asked, when we’d finished eating.
‘Yes, please, if you’re making it.’
I walked over to the side and put the kettle on. ‘Shall we go into the living room? I’ll bring the coffee through.’
‘Can I help you with the dishes first?’ Abe got up and brought our plates to the sink.
‘I’ll do it later.’
‘Okay.’ He hovered close behind me, as I busied myself with mugs.
‘Ivy?’
I turned, and almost bumped into him. ‘What?’
‘What I told you about Lynn. I know it’s not straightforward and I might be asking too much of you, especially as it’s not that long since you lost Richard but …’
‘Yes?’
‘I still see Lynn. We’re friends, and I know that might not be easy for you, but since I met you …’
‘Go on.’
‘You’re all I can think about!’ He laughed. ‘I know that sounds daft but it’s true and, well, I’d really like it if we could just see how things go.’
‘What do you mean?’ I knew, really. I knew he wanted to kiss me. I took a step closer.
When you don’t have sex for a long period there comes a time when you don’t miss it any more. It becomes a distant memory, rather than something you need or crave. It had been two years since Richard had died and I’d pretty much forgotten what it was to feel aroused by someone’s touch. But it didn’t take much to bring it all flooding back, for my body to respond instinctively to Abe’s kiss.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked, after a while.
‘Yes.’ I tried to formulate my thoughts. I was scared of being with someone new, after so long. I was scared that I wasn’t ready. I was scared by how much I wanted him in my life. I was scared that if I gave in to those feelings, admitted them even, I’d get hurt, and I was only just beginning to stop hurting. ‘I’m not sure I can do this,’ I said to Abe, unsure of what I actually meant.
‘It’s only kissing,’ he said, stroking my hair.
‘I suppose it is.’
I looked around Abe’s living room, trying to absorb a little more of him through the accumulated items of his life. It was lined with bookcases, which were filled with classics, travel books, contemporary novels and coffee-table tomes on architecture.
A week had passed and he’d invited me for lunch at his flat, the one he’d been renting on his own since moving out of the family home but which was still full of enough of the trappings of family life not to feel like a bachelor pad: photographs of young children, a garishly painted clay pencil pot on his desk, not unlike the one I have, a corkboard in the hallway tacked with drawings and notes that must go back years.
‘Daddy, my tooth fell out today,’ read the childish handwriting on a yellowed scrap of paper. ‘Dad, Lewis Hamilton won the Grand Prix!!!’ said another, written in a slightly older hand. ‘I recorded it for you.’
‘All the things I missed, working late,’ Abe said, catching me looking at it.
‘It’s nice that you kept them.’
‘Actually, it was Lynn. She never th
rows anything away. She put them all on the board when I moved out.’
He said it casually, as if this was the way it went when you separated after the children had grown up, but I knew couples who had simply walked away from each other and that period of their lives, as if it had never happened. It said a lot about Abe that the relationships he had with Lynn and his children were still good and ongoing but it was hard to know where I might fit in a life that was already crowded.
On a unit in the corner I spotted a record player and beneath it a stack of LPs. I flicked through them, as I waited for Abe to bring the coffee. There were a few newer albums, Arctic Monkeys, Laura Marling and Rufus Wainwright, but most of them dated way back: Bob Dylan, Little Richard, Hank Williams, Woody Guthrie and the Mamas and the Papas. I pulled out the latter.
‘You want to put it on?’ Abe asked.
I shook my head. ‘Just seeing if my song is on it.’
‘ “For The Love Of Ivy”?’
‘You know it.’
‘I used to love it when I was younger,’ he said, and I experienced a slight sense of déjà vu.
Next to the record player, a shorter bookcase was covered with family photographs. ‘Are these your children?’ I asked, peering at one, as Abe returned with a tray. It showed a young boy, who looked much as I imagined Abe had when he was young, sitting on steps next to an older girl, his sister.
‘Yes. Ruby and Sam.’
‘Sam’s like you.’ I studied the photograph more closely and noticed something on the step between the two children. ‘Is that a tortoise?’
‘Yes.’
‘I didn’t think you were allowed tortoises as pets any more.’
‘Fred was mine when I was a child,’ he said. ‘He’s still alive but Sam has him now. He became his when they were growing up.’
‘That’s lovely,’ I said. ‘To have a pet that stays with you all that time. And is this Lynn?’
‘Yes.’ Abe stood next to me. ‘It was taken years ago on a holiday.’
She must have been in her mid-fifties but was still strikingly beautiful. She had shoulder-length ash-blonde hair, piercing blue eyes and the sort of bone structure that enabled women to retain their looks well into old age. I felt plain in comparison, or if not plain, because I knew I hadn’t aged too badly, unable to compete. ‘She’s very beautiful.’
Ivy and Abe Page 6