Once the meeting had been arranged – Farnham park, two p.m. – I could barely contain myself, so I paced around the apartment until Luke surfaced, whereupon I convinced him he wanted a cooked breakfast, just to give me something to do.
I was nervous as to whether Rob would still appeal, but when I got there, he looked even better than I remembered. He was tanned and relaxed after his fortnight in the sun and, unsurprisingly, looked at home amongst the greenery of the park.
We were both wearing jeans and similar green hiking jackets. “We look like a team or something,” I said when I arrived.
“We do,” Rob agreed, starting to walk across the park. “So your kid’s OK on his own, is he?”
“He’s very mature. He really doesn’t give me any trouble at all,” I said. “He has a friend round and they’re playing Grand Theft Auto, so they won’t even move from the sofa is my guess.”
Rob nodded. “When we were that age we were out on our bikes,” he said.
“I know. It’s a shame. But you can’t really fight it.”
“Not if you want to stay friends with them you can’t.”
“So, do you have kids too?”
“It’s a shame we can’t go to yours though,” Rob said, and I wondered if he had even heard me. “I was hoping for a cuddle.”
“Me too.”
“I’ve been thinking about it since the last time.”
“Even when you were on a beach in Lanzarote?”
“Especially when I was on the beach in Lanzarote.”
“So who were you with? I take it you didn’t go alone?”
“Shall we go over there and get a coffee?” Rob asked, nodding towards the cafe.
“Sure. Why not.”
It was a cold, bright spring day and as we crossed the park, Rob bumped his hip against mine and grinned at me. “You’ve gone quiet,” he said after a few minutes.
“I don’t know what to talk about now,” I said. “You don’t seem to want to talk about you that much.”
“Don’t I?”
“No. You never tell me anything about yourself.”
“OK. So what do you want to know?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. How about who you went on holiday with? How about where you live?”
Rob laughed. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not that keen.” He pointed to an oak tree. “That branch needs lopping off before it falls on someone. I used to work for the council, but then they outsourced it all. As you can see, it’s very much minimum service these days, what with all the cutbacks.”
“So you’re never going to tell me anything about yourself?”
“I just told you I used to work for the council,” Rob said, grinning cheekily.
“You’re right. You did,” I laughed. Because despite my annoyance, all I really wanted to do was kiss him.
The frustration, as we sat, knee to knee in the park cafe, was almost unbearable, and apparently the feeling was mutual because twice Rob glanced furtively around and ran his fingers over my hand, and as soon as we stepped out of the cafe, he scanned the horizon and pointed at some bushes in the distance. “Over there,” he said.
“Over there what?”
“In the Photinia.”
“What?” I asked, matching his stride and peering at the bushes in search of a clue.
“In the bushes!”
“What’s in the bushes?”
“My kiss!”
As we pushed our way into the greenery, I flashed back to the drunken sexual fumblings of many years earlier in this very park and felt momentarily disgusted with myself, and ashamed at what I was about to do. But Rob was perfect. He really did just want to kiss. Which was just as well, as I don’t think I could have refused him anything. We kissed and hugged and kissed again. He ran his hands beneath my jumper and pulled me tight. And then finally, he declared, “Actually, this is worse than doing nothing. It’s just too frustrating!” and pushed me laughingly away.
As we clambered out of the undergrowth an elderly woman walking her dog glowered at us, and I didn’t need a diploma in psychology to guess what she thought we had been up to. If only I could have put her right; if only I could have explained to her how loving that hug felt, how right.
As we headed across the green towards the car park, I asked Rob again if I could have his phone number.
“I’d rather just call you,” he said.
“Are you a spy or something? Is being a tree surgeon just a cover?”
“Something like that,” Rob said with a chuckle.
“Seriously, Rob. This isn’t funny. You have my number. You know where I work. You know I have a son. You know I’m divorcing.”
“Divorcing, are you?” Rob asked. “No, I didn’t know that.”
“You see, there you go. Another question avoided.”
We had reached Rob’s van. He fished his keys from his pocket, then turned and smiled sadly at me. “Look, Cliff,” he said earnestly.
“Yes?”
“I will tell you at some point. I’ll tell you everything, OK? But not yet.”
I swallowed and nodded. “It’s OK. As long as you tell me if it’s going to be another month before I hear from you again, it’s OK.”
Rob looked me in the eye. His forehead wrinkled as he considered something, then relaxed as he asked, “When are you free? I mean, free-free. When’s your son go back to his mum’s?”
“Monday. After school.”
“So how about Monday night?”
I slipped into a broad grin.
“I’ll take that as a yes then, shall I?” Rob said, touching my cheek, and then remembering he was in public, dropping his hand and glancing around.
I nodded.
“Sevenish?”
“Sure. I’ll get some food in.”
“I wouldn’t bother on my account. I will have eaten by then.” He reached down and unlocked the door to his van, folded himself inside, and then wound down the window.
“Rob. Just one thing,” I said.
He looked up at me, and seeing him from this new angle, I was stunned, again, at how sexy I found him. “Yes?”
“You don’t have, you know, a boyfriend, do you?”
Rob laughed. “No Cliff, I don’t have a boyfriend.”
“OK,” I said.
“So, Monday?”
I nodded. “Monday.”
He winked at me, then started the engine and drove away quickly, his tyres spitting gravel, but just as he turned the corner, when his van was almost out of sight, something caught my eye: the phone number on the back of his van. I couldn’t believe I hadn’t noticed it before.
Oh-seven-seven-four-five . . . I chanted until I had fished my phone from my pocket and typed it in. I wouldn’t ever use it, I promised myself. Not until Rob gave me the number himself. But all the same, creating a new entry in my iPhone and typing “Rob” gave me the warmest feeling I had had for years.
That Monday, Rob arrived as promised at seven p.m. sharp. We drank a few beers and chatted and kissed and cuddled and again brought each other to a climax, and as before, it felt blokey and relaxed, wholesome and right, even if Rob’s continuing secrecy hovered at the edge of the landscape like a storm cloud threatening rain.
But from then on his visits were regular – every third evening as long as Luke was elsewhere – and I began to settle into an uneasy relationship with a man I barely knew at all. A relationship with a man! This was a revolution for me, but it felt surprisingly easy, perhaps because Rob’s reticence enabled me to pretend that it wasn’t really a relationship at all.
Once, Rob phoned when Luke was holding my phone – he had exhausted his own data plan – and Luke asked me, once I had hung up, who I had been talking to.
“A friend,” I said. “From work.”
“Your voice went weird,” Luke commented.
“Weird?”
“Yeah.”
“How?”
“Dunno. Just weird. You didn’t sound like
you.”
“Well he’s a work colleague,” I said, as if this somehow explained that.
Luke nodded and went back to checking his Facebook account, but I couldn’t help but wonder what special voice I had used to talk to Rob and quite what that might have revealed to my son.
The next time Rob called, I listened to myself, and heard the soft, quiet voice I used with him. And I decided that I rather liked it.
His fifth visit to the flat turned out to be the watershed moment when everything shifted. Not only had he brought condoms so that we could “try something new” – but he asked, afterwards, if he could stay the night.
After months of sleeping alone, having his arms around me felt amazing. I barely slept a wink, and purposely so – I didn’t want to miss a minute of the experience.
In the morning I awoke at first light to find that we had reversed our positions and Rob was now nestled against me, his head lying across my arm.
I yawned, and Rob said brightly, “You awake then?”
I cleared my throat. “Just about.”
“Did you sleep OK?”
I snorted. “Not really,” I said. “But I’m not complaining. It’s the nicest night I’ve spent in a long, long time.”
Rob turned his head and kissed my arm then said, “Well, don’t get used to it or anything. I can’t do this often.”
“Because?” I asked.
The pause was so long that I assumed that Rob had simply decided, as was his way, not to answer the question. But he had apparently been weighing up his answer the entire time, because he finally said, “Well, I’m married, aren’t I.”
Despite the fact that I no longer wanted to hold him in my arms, I remained frozen as I waited for my thoughts to clarify. I was aware that he had finally told me something, and that this was something I had been asking for since we met, even if it was the last thing that I had wanted to hear him say.
“Cliff?” Rob prompted.
“Yes?”
“Did you hear me?”
“Yes.”
Rob rolled away, then bounced until he was facing me on the pillow. He stared at me questioningly, his big brown eyes oozing concern.
“You said you’re married,” I said.
Rob nodded and bit his bottom lip.
“Is that married as in married-but-divorcing, like me?”
He shook his head.
“You’re still together then?”
A nod.
“Kids?”
“Two. A boy and a girl. Eleven and fourteen.”
I thought about this for a moment. “I’m assuming she doesn’t know about you.”
Rob shook his head.
“And last night?”
“She’s at her sister’s place with the kids. She gets back tonight.”
“I see.”
“And now you’re angry,” Rob said. “You see, I shouldn’t have told you.”
I shrugged as my reply. Because I wasn’t sure what I was feeling at all.
The fact that Rob was married provoked a whole raft of feelings I felt ill equipped to deal with. The imagery went from the intellectual – the lies I knew he would be telling his wife about where he had been – to the graphic: the taste of me in his mouth as he kissed his wife, the odour of my sweat on his skin as he helped his kids with their homework. So I felt guilty. Of course.
More surprisingly, seeing as I had never once acted upon them, I began to feel guilty because of my desires during my time with Hannah. Ironically, I also managed to feel ashamed that I hadn’t acted upon them, that I hadn’t been as brave as Rob, who, it seemed, accomplished his own duplicity without the slightest hint of discomfort. “The way I look at it,” he would say, when asked, “as long as no one knows, then no one is getting hurt.”
I knew and I hurt for them all, but still, I couldn’t give Rob up. Not only did the sex we were having move from revolutionary through gymnastic before setting into amazing as the weeks went by, but I started to admit to myself, and to Jenny, that despite all of the limitations that Rob’s circumstances imposed, I was falling in love with him. I could sit in front of a work spreadsheet and go glazy-eyed thinking about his dimples, about the downy fur on his upper arms, about the sensation of his hairy legs against mine when, at the beginning, we had fucked, and more lately, whenever we made love. It all seemed unexpected and immature and absurd, but that was what was happening to me.
When he was around the flat, he was thoughtful and tactile and funny and sexy. The rest of his life remained as opaque as the opening scene from a spy movie, but as Rob himself once said, I was perhaps the only person on the planet who could understand, empathise with, and yes, tolerate his situation. Because though I had never once gone looking for a Rob during my fifteen years with Hannah, I knew why. I knew that I had been scared shitless. I had known that if I met a Rob back then, I would do exactly what Rob was doing now. It had been a tightrope walk over a terrifying precipice, and I had managed, just about, to keep my balance. And knowing how difficult that had been, how could I possibly blame Rob for having wobbled and fallen off?
One day in April, while I was waiting for him to arrive, the front door opened and Luke’s head peeped around the door.
“Luke?!” I exclaimed, standing to cross the room and already fumbling in my pocket for my phone so that I could text a warning message to Rob. He had, by then, accepted the use of anonymous, non-specific text messages.
“Mum’s going to Australia,” Luke blurted, looking red-faced, perhaps from the bicycle ride, perhaps with emotion.
When I reached him, I glanced at my phone screen, on which I had attempted to type, “Luke’s here,” but on which – after the iPhone’s overactive auto-correction facility had had its way – was frustratingly displayed, “Liked jets.”
I deleted the message and crouched down in front of Luke. “What’s wrong?”
“I said!” Luke said in what was almost a shriek. “Mum’s going to Australia. She’s on her way here to convince you.”
“But we knew she was going to—”
“But she’s going to tell you something to convince you to make me go. I heard her on the phone.”
“Luke, there isn’t a single phrase in existence that Hannah could say to convince me to make you move to Australia,” I said. “Not one. Now, just give me ten seconds and—”
But it was too late, because, there, on the landing, right behind Luke, was Rob. The second Rob caught sight of us both, he turned and scooted back down the stairs.
“Luke, everything’s going to be fine. Just give me ten seconds . . .” I said, and I ran after Rob, pulling the front door closed behind me.
I caught up with him at the back of the building just as he reached his van. “Rob!” I called, and he paused, and turned, then broke into a reassuring smile. “Looks like a change of plan,” he said.
“I’m sorry. There’s some family crisis going on. Hannah’s on her way over apparently. Luke’s almost in tears.”
Rob nodded. “It’s fine,” he said. “I understand.”
“You do?”
“Of course I do. If I don’t get that family comes first, who does, eh?”
“Sure. Well, I’m sorry, anyway.”
Rob reached out to touch my arm, but then glanced at the building behind me and withdrew his hand sharply. “We’re being watched,” he said. No trace of the smile remained.
I turned to look up at my balcony just in time to see the bay window sliding closed. “Was it Luke?” I asked.
“A lad. So yes, I guess so.”
“I’m so sorry, Rob. I really have to go,” I offered with an embarrassed shrug.
“I know,” Rob said. “Just go and sort it out. I’ll see you on Wednesday as usual.”
Back indoors, I found Luke in the kitchen drinking juice from the carton.
“Don’t drink out—”
“I know, it’s unhygienic,” Luke said mockingly.
“It makes it go off. The backwash from y
our mouth makes it go off faster.”
“But I don’t backwash.”
I rolled my eyes.
“Who was that?” Luke asked, his voice studiously casual.
“Who? Oh, Rob?” I said, managing my own “casual” less convincingly.
“Who’s Rob?”
“He’s a friend.”
“How come I never saw him before?”
I shrugged. “I have lots of friends you don’t know.”
Luke frowned. “Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Who?”
“You don’t know them, Luke. That’s what I’m saying. Anyway, what was all that about? Why are you here?”
“Is he a good friend?”
I rubbed the bridge of my nose. “He’s just a normal friend. Someone I have a pint with sometimes.”
“When I’m not here.”
“When you’re not here. Anyway, what—”
“What does a tree surgeon do?”
“I’m sorry?”
“It says ‘tree surgeon’ on his van.”
“Yes. He’s a tree surgeon. He cuts bits off trees.”
“So he’s a gardener?”
“Yes.”
“Why doesn’t it say ‘gardener’ then?”
“Because a specialist gardener who climbs up trees to cut off branches is called a tree surgeon.”
“That’s stupid.”
“Yes, it is a bit. Now, what was so urgent you came rushing in here?”
“It’s Mum,” Luke said, looking concerned again. “She’s a bit mad today. And she’s coming here to convince you to send me to Au—” He was interrupted by the intercom buzzer.
I sighed heavily, then crossed the room to buzz her in.
“I thought that was your bike outside,” Hannah said, addressing Luke the second I opened the door. “What are you doing here?” Then as an aside, she added, “Hi, Cliff.”
I nodded and forced a smile.
“I needed this,” Luke said, miraculously producing a geometry textbook that I knew he hadn’t looked at since the previous autumn. “I needed it for my homework.”
Hannah nodded. “OK. Well head back and I’ll see you at home.”
“Is he there?” Luke asked.
“Yes. You know he is. He’s leaving tomorrow.”
Other Halves Page 18