‘Can I wear your dressing gown to the bathroom?’
‘You don’t have to keep asking, Ivy,’ he said, as I put it on.
‘Thanks.’ I glanced at my watch and headed for the door.
‘Just a sec,’ Abe said.
‘What?’
‘Come here.’
‘Really, I have to get dressed.’ I smiled.
‘I just want to tell you something,’ he said. ‘It’ll only take a few seconds.’
‘So tell me.’ I stood opposite him as he sat on the bed, and he slipped his hand under the dressing gown. ‘That’s not helpful.’
‘I just wanted to say I’m so glad I met you.’
He pulled me a little closer and kissed my breast. ‘Now go and get your sodding shower!’
The particular Marquis of Granby pub we’d arranged to meet in was just around the corner from the National Portrait Gallery.
‘There are quite a few of them,’ Abe had told me. ‘He was an eighteenth-century general who gave his officers money to set up pubs when they retired. Lots named them after him.’
‘How do you know that?’ The bits of information Abe fed me were like gifts. I glanced at the picture of the marquis on the board outside. I’d never have suspected he was a military philanthropist.
‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ I said. Abe was sitting at a table in the corner. ‘I got held up at work. Have you been waiting long?’
‘Only this long.’ He held three fingers to the edge of his pint, indicating how much he had drunk.
‘How long is that?’ I tried to remember who used to measure cake in minutes.
‘It doesn’t matter because I was happy with my pint, knowing that at some point you would walk through the door.’ He stood up and kissed me. ‘What would you like to drink?’
‘A glass of white wine, please.’
‘I’ll be back,’ he said, touching my cheek before going to the bar.
‘So, how was your day?’ he asked, when he came back, bearing drinks.
‘Very good.’
‘Very?’
‘It was, actually. Alex, my boss, has asked me to work on a new tour in India.’
‘And what does that entail?’
‘Lots of extra work. Lots of phone calls. Lots of meetings. Lots of trying to get through to people in places where it’s hard to reach anyone. More responsibility for no extra money!’ I grinned and took a sip of my drink.
‘And the very good thing “actually”?’ Abe asked.
‘It’s my tour. If I do all the planning and organizing from start to finish, it’ll look good on my CV and it’ll be interesting to research and plan and …’ I paused for dramatic effect – and to tease Abe.
‘Oh, is that the time?’ He looked as his watch, mocking me. ‘Go on, then. What is it?’
‘I get to go there, probably in the autumn, to check out the transport links and hotels and all of that.’
‘Wow!’ he said. Was he a little put out? ‘That does sound exciting. How long for?’
‘Only a couple of weeks,’ I said. ‘But if it works well and the tour attracts customers, there will be other trips.’ Maybe you could come on one, I wanted to say, but didn’t dare, not just yet.
‘Which part of India?’
‘Rajasthan,’ I told him. ‘Alex wants to set up a two-week tour, taking in Delhi and the Taj Mahal, then Jaipur and Jodhpur and Udaipur.’
‘That’s a lot of purs,’ Abe said.
‘They’re amazing places,’ I said. ‘I’ve been looking them all up this afternoon. I’m really excited about it.’
‘And a little nervous?’ he asked.
‘Not really. Why? Do you think I should be?’
‘Travelling on your own to a country you don’t know, with a job to do? I would be.’
‘It’s what I want to do,’ I said, wondering if he was anxious for me or simply that I’d be away too much. ‘It’s the reason I took this job. I’m sure I’ll start worrying nearer the time but at the moment I can’t quite believe I’m being paid to do things I want to do anyway.’
‘I love your spirit of adventure, Ivy,’ he said, smiling at me.
‘Well, you only live –’ I changed tack: ‘You’re only young once.’
‘I guess so,’ he said. ‘Well, that’s great. I’m really pleased for you. It sounds as if Alex has a lot of faith in you.’
‘He’s a good boss,’ I said. ‘And it’s a small company so I get opportunities I wouldn’t if I worked for a bigger one.’
‘And where does Chris fit into it?’ he’d asked.
I’d introduced them briefly at the party where we’d met.
‘He’s freelance. He does design stuff.’
‘And were you looking to meet a penniless art student when you came to that party with him, or did he think you’d go home with him afterwards?’ he asked, turning the conversation into one that you keep having in the early days of a new relationship, when you go over and over things, holding on to the initial meeting and wondering at it.
‘I wasn’t looking to meet anyone. I only went because my boss told me I ought to.’
‘So you were keeping Chris sweet?’
‘Something like that.’
I still couldn’t quite believe this was happening and that it felt so right. ‘Were you going to kick me out for gatecrashing when you asked who’d invited me?’
‘No. I was hoping you’d gatecrashed and that Chris hadn’t invited you because if he had I didn’t think I stood a chance.’
‘Really?’ I wanted more. I had to know that he’d felt the same as I had when I first saw him.
‘No, not really,’ he said. ‘I thought you’d just strayed in off the street and needed redirecting to the British Museum.’
I slapped his thigh lightly.
He caught my hand and held it there. ‘You know why I came over and talked to you?’
‘There must have been far more interesting people you wanted to talk to.’
‘I saw you and thought you looked nice but maybe a little dull. Who knew? I took a gamble!’
I laughed. ‘I’m not going to ask if it paid off.’
‘Seriously, Ivy, I saw you and thought you looked like a lovely person, and as soon as we started chatting, I knew you were. But I thought it might be a bit less straightforward than it seems.’
‘What do you mean?’ Had he guessed that I was holding something back? Every conversation we’d had during the past few weeks had been one in which we’d got to know each other a little better. We’d talked about our backgrounds, our families and friends, and filled each other in on what we’d been doing all that time before we met. But I hadn’t told him about Mum.
This was the first time, since I’d found out, that I’d been with someone whom it felt important to tell. But when was the right time? He needed to know only if the relationship was going somewhere. If I told him, would it scare him off? I didn’t want to risk that, not yet. But I didn’t want to hold back and be accused of deceiving him later either. It lay, awkwardly unrevealed, between us.
‘To be honest, I thought you’d probably already be with someone. I wasn’t sure how old you were. You could have been married with kids for all I knew,’ Abe said now.
‘I don’t look that old, surely.’ I was partly relieved that he’d been on entirely the wrong track, but at the same time wishing he’d been on the right one. Abe’s only a few months older than I am.
‘You can be married at sixteen in this country,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to wait until you’re in your fifties.’
‘Well, I’m not.’
‘Never have been?’
‘No.’ I grinned and took a sip of the not particularly nice wine I was drinking. ‘Well, only briefly at sixteen, but it didn’t last.’
‘I knew it.’ He put his arm round me and pulled me to him. ‘I knew someone would have snapped you up as soon as possible. What went wrong?’
‘Oh, you know. We were too young. It was never going to last. He was a
psychopath. That kind of thing.’
‘I’ve got psychopathic tendencies too. Is it a problem?’
‘I’ve noticed. I’m still trying to decide if it’s going to be an issue or not.’
We laughed.
‘But I imagine there’s been someone who was important to you. Was it the psychopath who made you a child bride before he tried to kill you?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘There was someone before him.’
Abe spluttered into his beer and laughed but I was half serious and wanted him to be serious now too. ‘Go on,’ he said, and appeared to be concentrating on his beer, not looking at me.
I had the chance to give him one of the covert sidelong glances I liked giving him when he didn’t know I was looking at him so that I could take in the contours of his face and the thickness of his hair, remind myself what he looked like and marvel that he was there, with me.
And I wondered, although I knew I was making a giant leap of faith by doing so, if, when we were in our fifties and Abe was driving somewhere and I was sitting in the passenger seat, I would still snatch sidelong glances and marvel that he was with me.
I hoped so. But I didn’t dare hope too much.
Sometimes I didn’t dare hope that I’d reach my fifties.
‘Well, there was a boy at primary school I was very fond of.’ I thought back to what seemed like another life.
‘I had a girl like that. I was very shy and so was she.’
‘I was shy at school too.’
‘I can’t imagine that. You seem so self-assured.’
‘Do I? Thank you.’
I didn’t feel self-assured except when I was with Abe, when I felt I could be the me I’d like to be.
‘What happened to her? The sweet shy girl?’
‘I’ve no idea. We moved away. What about Primary School Boy? What happened to him?’
‘I don’t know either.’
‘And after him?’
Abe was probing and I was enjoying it. It’s part of the dance you do when you first meet someone: the wanting to know about their previous relationships and the slight sense of triumph that they went wrong, because you’re hoping that the new one you’re embarking on now will be the one in which everything turns out right.
‘Oh, you know,’ I said. ‘There was someone in the sixth form and a guy I met when I was travelling whom I went out with for a while, but when the time came we went our separate ways happily enough.’
‘Not your soul-mate?’ Abe asked.
‘No.’
‘And since then?’ He looked at me intently.
‘A few people, nothing that’s lasted very long.’ I stopped because I almost said ‘until’. ‘It’s all fairly unexciting,’ I finished, although, of course, there were moments when it had seemed the opposite: having sex properly, for the first time with Nathan, a brief affair with a Greek waiter, a two-week tempestuous fling with a cycle courier when I first moved to London. There were moments of my love life that had been exciting, but in a different way from how I felt now.
I didn’t know what it was about Abe but it already felt as if it might last. Perhaps you always think that at the start of a new relationship.
But, as I said, I didn’t dare to hope.
‘What about you?’ I asked him.
‘There was someone I was with in the sixth form I really liked.’ He paused. ‘But then, well, by the time I got to art school I was that much older than everyone else.’
He’d told me before that he’d intended to go to uni, had been planning to read architecture but had changed his mind and worked for a few years before deciding to go to art school. ‘There was stuff going on at home,’ he told me now. ‘With my parents. It kind of stalled me.’
‘Was that when they split up?’ I knew his parents didn’t live together. He’d told me before that they were both in Oxfordshire but his mum had moved out of the family home. I hadn’t probed further at the time. But I’d wondered how old he’d been when they’d separated and how it had affected him. I hadn’t asked yet because I feared it would lead to him asking about my parents and I hadn’t been ready for that.
Maybe now was the time.
‘Yes. I suppose so. Kind of. They’re not exactly …’
‘What?’
‘Well, they don’t live together any more but they’re not divorced or anything.’
‘So they’re separated?’
‘It’s not as simple as that. It’s all a bit weird. It was really strange at the time and I still find it odd, especially telling other people.’
‘You’d better tell me.’ I picked up my glass and slugged my wine.
‘Ivy,’ he said, ‘it’s nothing bad. Well, it was. It was hard for all of us and it’s difficult for Dad but it’s not the sort of bad that will affect you and me.’
‘Sorry.’ I put the glass down again and held his hand.
‘It’s the sort of thing that if I was a different person I’d probably have told you at the party. It would be my party story. But it does upset me and I just wanted to get to know you better first. You’ll probably think I’m just being daft but it’s not the kind of thing I’d have told you if we were just going to be a flash in the pan.’
I said nothing but I held his hand a little tighter, thanking him silently for that.
‘Do you want another drink?’ He looked at my glass, which was nearly empty, while he had still drunk only five fingers.
I shook my head.
‘When I was doing my A levels,’ he began, ‘we lived in Oxford and Mum had an admin job just outside, at a hospital in Thame. More of a rehabilitation centre, really.’
‘Go on.’
‘She used to drive there every day. She only worked a few hours. It wasn’t great money but she’d been at home with all of us for years. She liked the people and she enjoyed getting out.’
‘Yes.’
‘There was an accident one day, on the road, when she was coming home. There was this lorry carrying a load of hay bales. Mum always used to have a thing about them. She thought they never looked safe so she’d always slow down and keep her distance.’
‘And something happened?’ Had his mother been injured in an accident? Was she in a hospital or a home somewhere now?
‘Yes, but not to Mum.’
‘Oh, okay.’
‘Not directly anyway.’ He took a sip of beer. ‘The thing is, the bales started to fall off the lorry and there was a girl riding her bike on the side of the road. The car behind the lorry, which was just in front of Mum, swerved to avoid the bale and it went straight into the girl on the bike.’
‘Jesus.’ I could imagine the scene.
‘Mum stopped. Everyone stopped. The driver of the car in front was really shaken, obviously. He hadn’t meant to hit the girl. He’d just swerved instinctively because there was a bale falling towards him. But the girl was pretty badly injured.’
‘And your mum saw it all?’
‘The girl had hit her head and she was barely conscious. Someone went to call an ambulance. The driver of the car that hit her was in shock, the lorry driver too. Mum ended up sitting with the girl, talking to her, while they waited for the ambulance.’
‘And was she okay?’
‘No, that was the thing. She died before it arrived. She died in my mother’s arms, there on the roadside.’
‘Oh, God. That must have been terrible.’
‘I can’t imagine it, but to watch a young girl dying like that by the roadside when she had five children of her own … It really affected her.’
‘In what way?’ Clearly this was leading somewhere.
‘At first she was just shocked and upset. She wanted to go to the funeral but the girl’s parents wanted to keep it small. There was a lot in the local papers at the time.’
‘Did she meet them?’
‘No. She asked the police if she could but they didn’t want to talk to her. Maybe it was too hard for them, knowing someone else was with their daughte
r when she died. I can kind of understand them not wanting to meet Mum.’
‘But it might have helped her.’
‘We’ll never know. Afterwards, Mum couldn’t get it out of her mind. She had nightmares and she stopped driving so she had to give up her job. She ended up staying at home and becoming very withdrawn.’
‘That must have been difficult.’
‘It was. I was the only one living at home at the time. Jackie and Alan had left and Kirsty’d just started nursing. Tessa still came back in the holidays – she’d just started her teacher training – but really it was just Mum and Dad and me, and Mum appeared to opt out.’
That sounded familiar. ‘Did she see anyone?’
‘Just the doctor, who suggested counselling, and I think she went once or twice but it didn’t seem to make a difference, and then …’ He paused. ‘This is the weird bit.’
‘She found God?’
‘Yes. She’d gone to church before, not all the time but at Christmas, Easter, maybe some Sundays, but then she started going more and she seemed happier. It clearly helped until …’
‘What?’
‘She decided to go and live at this convent.’
‘She became a nun?’ I was more shocked by that idea than by Abe’s description of the accident.
‘She couldn’t because she was married. At first she just went to stay on some kind of retreat, but she was happy there. She wanted to stay. She works in the office now and helps with the running of the place.’
‘So she’s there for ever?’
‘Kind of indefinitely.’
‘And do you see her?’
‘She’s allowed visitors on Sundays. I see her when I can and Dad goes once a month, but the rest of the time, no. It’s a closed order and, although she’s not a nun, she lives by the rules.’
‘But she’s your mother.’
‘I did feel abandoned. Dad too. I guess at first we both thought she’d come home but she’s been there nearly ten years. It doesn’t seem very likely that she’ll ever leave.’
‘God, that must be really hard.’ I thought about my own mother and how she’d changed. People said it was her condition, not her reaction to it, that made her depressed and unpredictable. And I thought about the risk factors that flew around in my head, which I ignored as best I could. I knew I should tell Abe: he deserved to know that things were not straightforward at home for me either. But he looked so drained, having just told me what he had. The time didn’t seem right.
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