by Silver, Amy
The snow is falling harder now, so we duck into a bar just around the corner from Aidan’s office where we order two coffees and two whiskies. Just to warm us up. We sit in a snug in the corner, raise our glasses and clink.
‘So, what’s going on, Nic?’
‘I’m just here for a few days. Karl’s having a party for New Year’s Eve.’
‘Oh, yes. He mentioned.’
‘You’re going?’
‘I wasn’t planning to. I no longer feel very festive this time of year.’ He sips his whisky.
‘I know what you mean. But seeing as it’s Karl, I thought … Well. I never see him any more, you know?’
‘Oh, I know. I think it’s great you’re going. He’ll be so happy to see you. And it has been four years … It doesn’t seem like four years though, does it?’
I shrug. ‘I don’t know. It does and it doesn’t. It hurts like it happened yesterday, but I feel like I haven’t seen him in a centenary. Every now and again I have to get a photograph out because I feel like I can’t remember what he looks like.’ I look up at Aidan. ‘I suppose you don’t really have that problem.’
‘You always said we looked the same. I could never see it. He was much better-looking than me.’
‘Much, much better-looking,’ I say, and he laughs. ‘Also kinder, funnier, more intelligent …’
‘Yes, all right.’ He looks away as he says this, so I’m not quite sure but I think he has tears in his eyes. ‘I fucking miss him, Nicole.’
‘I know.’
Aidan is sitting with his back to the window. He gets up and moves his chair around to my side, so we can sit together and watch the snow, which is really coming down now, a blizzard.
‘I’m supposed to be in a meeting with a new director in ten minutes,’ Aidan says.
‘And I’m supposed to be meeting my husband at the Met in half an hour,’ I say.
He looks at me and grins, a cheeky, let’s-play-hooky grin. ‘I’ll cancel if you’ll cancel,’ he says.
‘Won’t you get into trouble?’ I ask him.
‘With whom? I’m the boss.’
‘That’s right, you are. I can’t believe you’re the boss. You’re way too irresponsible to be the boss of anything.’
Aidan rings his office and makes his excuses while I ring Dom.
‘The weather’s horrendous,’ he says before I can say anything. ‘Shall we do the Met tomorrow instead?’
‘Okay.’
‘Are you on your way back?’ he asks.
‘I’m in Bloomingdale’s,’ I lie. ‘I haven’t found a dress yet.’
Aidan goes to the bar and orders two more whiskies. When he sits back down next to me and slips his hand into mine a jolt of electricity goes through me. Sense memory. I remember what it feels like to hold his hand. I remember the last time we held hands like this. He was waiting outside my flat in Brixton the day I came back from Wales, after I heard. He was sitting outside on the steps, his head in his hands. I got out of the car and walked towards him, we were both crying. Neither of us said anything, but he took my hand and we walked up the steps together, into the house. Dom followed behind us. When I realised Dom was still there, I dropped Aidan’s hand, and I didn’t touch him again. I haven’t touched him since, not even at the funeral when he looked as though he needed someone to hold him up, and when I wanted more than anything to be that someone.
The snow stops falling. We finish our whiskies.
‘Shall we go for a walk?’ he asks me.
It’s quiet outside, everyone has taken refuge inside shops or offices. Taxis roll by slowly, all of Manhattan is muffled by the thick carpet of snow. We crunch along the street, heading in the direction of the East River. All of a sudden, Aidan asks me, ‘Have you walked the High Line?’
‘Is that a euphemism for something?’
He laughs. ‘No, the High Line. It’s this old elevated freight railway that was built in the thirties. It closed down years ago, but it’s now been reopened as this kind of long, narrow public park thirty feet up in the air. It’s kind of cool. You really ought to see it when the wildflowers are out, but it should be fun in the snow, too.’
‘That sounds good.’
‘Let’s go then.’
Aidan hails a cab and asks the driver to take us to West 20th Street by way of the park. As we drive through picture postcard perfect Central Park blanketed in white, deserted and silent, I feel giddy, drunk on more than a couple of whiskies. I’m transported back in time, I’m nineteen again, on the back of Aidan’s bike, riding off into the sunset. I have to pinch myself, to dig my nails into my palms and remind myself that I’m not nineteen, I’m thirty-three, I’m a married woman with a husband who’s waiting for me in a hotel room across town. I can’t run away and have adventures any more.
‘What are you smiling about?’ Aidan asks me.
‘Nothing,’ I reply. I didn’t realise that I was.
‘You’ve got that look,’ he says, ‘the one you get when you’re about to do something reckless. Are you about to do something reckless?’
‘I am not,’ I say. ‘My reckless days are over.’
‘That’s a shame. You were always fun when you were reckless.’
The taxi drops us at the corner of West 20th and 10th, where a metal stairway leads up from the pavement. Taking care not to slip on the icy steps, we climb to the top and begin walking south along the line.
To our right, we look out across Chelsea Pier and the Hudson River towards Jersey, dimly lit in the distance. We reach 10th Avenue Square, a kind of mini-auditorium where you can sit and watch the traffic whizz by underneath by way of a viewing window. We stand up against the glass, watching taxis slushing past.
Aidan’s BlackBerry beeps. He gives its screen a cursory glance, then turns it off. ‘Just work,’ he says.
‘Call them back.’
‘It can wait. Speaking of work, you never got back to me about the Libya job. It’s a great opportunity, Nic. I think you’d be perfect for it.’
‘I know, I was going to call you. I can’t do it, I’m afraid. That’s not the kind of work I do any more. I can’t leave London for months on end, that’s not what my life is like now.’
‘Why isn’t it? It’s not like you have kids …’ This sentence hangs in the air, like an unanswered question.
‘I have dogs,’ I reply. ‘And I have Dominic.’ I realise as I say this how ridiculous it sounds.
We walk on in silence. Suddenly, Aidan stops, he turns to me and says: ‘You’re going to be pissed off with me.’
‘Well, that makes a change …’
‘I have to say this, though.’
‘Say what?’
‘You need to start living your life again.’
‘What does that mean? I am living my life. Here I am. This is my life. I’m living it.’
‘You know what I mean.’
‘I don’t.’
‘Okay. After Julian died, you opted out. You stopped working—’
‘I still work.’
‘Oh, come on,’ he says, exasperated. ‘You stopped really working, you stopped playing …’
‘Playing?’
‘You stopped having fun.’
‘I was grieving, Aidan.’
‘I know, and it seems like you still are. He’s been gone four years, and you’re still the quiet, withdrawn, sad person you turned into after he died.’
‘How would you know, Aidan?’ I ask him crossly. ‘You haven’t seen me since he died.’ The annoying thing is that he’s right. Why is he right? How does he know?
‘I hear things,’ he says. Alex, of course. Alex and Karl, telling tales behind my back. How I’m not the girl I used to be. ‘Listen, Nic, I don’t want to piss you off, I really don’t, but it just feels like it’s a waste. You know? Do you remember how you were always making plans?’ Aidan asks me. ‘You were going to visit all seven continents, drive across Africa, run the Marathon des Sables, meet the Dalai Lama, live in a flat w
ith a roof garden in Rome, run your own company …’
‘I had my own company …’
‘Yeah, you had, past tense. You wound up everything when Jules died.’ He shakes his head sadly. ‘You and Julian, with your New Year’s Resolutions …’
‘I still make New Year’s Resolutions.’
‘Yeah? And what are they this year?’
I hesitate. I don’t want to tell him, not just because the whole New Year Resolution thing was very much our tradition, mine and Julian’s. Yes, I know everyone does it, but it still feels like it was peculiar to us. I don’t want to tell him what I’ve resolved to do, I can’t very well tell him about taking the pill, or about promising myself not to contact him, can I?
‘Well?’ he prompts me.
‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ I say, irritated. ‘I have to repaint the kitchen …’
He starts to laugh. ‘You have to repaint the kitchen?’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
‘That’s what I’m talking about. There was a time when you were planning to drive from the Cape to Cairo, or wanting to learn Mandarin. Now you’re talking about repainting the kitchen.’
‘That’s what growing up is about, Aidan. Not that you’d know, obviously, but there comes a time in your life when you can’t just think about holidays and adventures and having a good time, you have to think about … other things.’
‘The kitchen?’
‘Yes, the fucking kitchen. And marriage and kids …’
‘So you are thinking about having kids?’
I don’t want to have this conversation with him. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation with you,’ I say. ‘It’s none of your business.’
‘Okay.’
We walk on in silence. He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it.
‘I just want to know that you’re happy,’ he says, ‘that you haven’t settled for less than you deserve.’
I drop his hand and fold my arms across my chest. ‘If you’re talking about Dominic, then you’re way off,’ I say. ‘He’s a good man, he’s not a consolation prize. He’s a good husband, he doesn’t hurt me.’
‘Is that right?’ Aidan asks, a harder edge to his voice now. ‘Is that why you and Alex stopped talking?’
‘Fuck you,’ I snap at him and storm off along the deserted walkway. Then I stop and turn around, I storm back again. ‘You have no right, you know that? You have no fucking right to criticise my life, you have no right to question my choices, you have no right to talk to me about Alex or Dom. Especially Dom. He may not be perfect, it may not be the love affair that I had with you, but he does not break my fucking heart every chance he gets.’
‘That’s not fair, I never wanted to hurt you, Nicole …’ There’s hurt in his eyes, I’ve wounded him more than I intended, more than I thought I could. ‘I know I fucked up, I know I made a lot of mistakes. Laure was one of the big ones.’
‘You fell in love with her,’ I say, my voice a little softer now. ‘I suppose I can’t really hold that against you.’
He stops walking. ‘I didn’t love her. I never loved her,’ he says. ‘I thought I did, for a while, but it turns out that it was always you.’ He reaches out to me again, slipping his hand around my waist and into the small of my back, pulling me closer to him, brushing my hair back from my face. This is the point at which I should pull away, but I don’t want to. I want to stay here with him, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling his hands on me, this is where I want to be.
‘I don’t know what my life would have been if I hadn’t loved you.’ He kisses me on the mouth and I’m going back in time again, his lips on mine feel exactly the way they did when he kissed me on the beach in South Africa fifteen years ago. No other kiss has felt like that since.
‘The thing I never realised, back then, was that I didn’t have all the time in the world,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t until Julian died and you got married that it occurred to me that you were gone, you were really gone. I couldn’t have you. I’d always thought we’d end up together. I knew we’d end up together. You’re everything to me, you always have been. It just took me for ever to realise it.’
He’s saying all the things I ever wanted to hear from him and I can’t stand it, it’s too late. I pull away from him.
‘It took you too long, Aidan.’ I smile at him although I really want to cry. ‘It’s like what my dad said to me the other day. It’s always later than you think.’
We’ve reached the Gaansevoort Plaza, the end of the High Line. Below is the Meatpacking District, packed with bars and boutiques. Alex and I talked about coming here, to have brunch at Pastis, just like the girls from Sex and the City did. We take the steps back down to street level.
‘I should be getting back,’ I tell Aidan. ‘Dom will be wondering where I am.’
‘Can I see you again before you go?’ he asks.
‘No, you can’t Aidan. It’s time we said goodbye.’
I hail a cab and leave him standing at the intersection of 8th and Greenwich Avenue. It takes all my willpower to not look back at him, to see if he’s waving, or if he’s already turned away.
Chapter Eighteen
New Year’s Eve 2008
Lamu, Kenya
Resolutions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
IT WAS DOMINIC’S idea to take our honeymoon over the New Year. It wasn’t my choice: I was quite happy to leave it until the following summer, but Dom, who had never shown himself to be superstitious about anything up to that point, was adamant that it was bad luck not to honeymoon in the actual calendar year in which you get married, so it was our last chance.
We flew to Nairobi on the anniversary of Julian’s death. I self-medicated fairly heavily on the flight: four gin and tonics and half a bottle of red. It took us a couple of hours to get out of Nairobi Airport, I spent most of that time in the toilets throwing up, then we transferred to another, smaller airport and got onto another, much smaller plane for the sixty-minute flight to Manda Island.
I was feeling better by this point, and not just because I’d purged most of the alcohol from my system. Coming back to Africa made me feel better, it always did. There was something irresistibly invigorating about the noise and chaos, the heat and space, all that blood-red earth. We landed on Manda at around five o’clock, there was nothing there but an airstrip and a little wooden hut, on which someone had hung a painted sign saying ‘departure lounge’.
We – Dom and I, plus three other couples (from the looks of them, honeymooners too), and one set of exhausted-looking parents plus their two small children – were escorted to the shore and helped into two small boats, which ferried us across the narrow stretch of water which separates Manda from Lamu Island. I sat in between Dom’s skinny white legs at the back of the boat, leaning against him, watching as the setting sun caught the top of the whitewashed roofs of Lamu village, and I felt at peace. Maybe this had been a good idea after all. This is exactly the sort of thing Julian would have wanted me to do on the anniversary of his death, had he been around to make recommendations.
I’d spent a lot of time that year thinking about what Julian would have wanted me to do. Mostly, I think I’d gone against his wishes. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have approved of my abandonment of two film projects I’d been working on for months. I doubt very much he’d have thought that marrying Dominic was the best idea. Not under the circumstances, anyway.
We got married in March. It was about as low key a wedding as is possible: just me, Dom, Mum, Charles, Dom’s parents, Matt and Liz and Alex and Karl at the Chelsea Town Hall on a brisk Friday morning. I wore a pale-gold draped silk chiffon dress from Lanvin, Dom wore his best suit. We all took taxis to Petersham afterwards and had a fabulous lunch at the Nurseries. Nobody made any speeches. Everyone had a good time, except for Dom’s mum who said the whole thing was so sad it made her want to weep.
Since I’d never been the s
ort to want to dress up like a princess, it was exactly the sort of wedding I probably would have chosen even had I not been grieving. But that wasn’t really the point. It was the timing of the thing that caught everyone off guard. I could tell that even Dom was a little taken aback when, three weeks after the funeral, I told him I thought we ought to get married.
‘I thought you said you weren’t ready,’ he said.
‘I changed my mind,’ I replied.
‘I don’t even have a ring,’ he said.
‘You’ve been asking me to marry you for three years, Dominic. How can you not have a ring?’
‘I just … I don’t know. I suppose I thought I had at least another four or five New Years to go until you said yes.’
‘I don’t want a ring,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a ring. Let’s just do this quickly. No fuss, no tiaras, no bridesmaids, no churches. Okay?’
He agreed, and he didn’t ask more questions about why I’d changed my mind. I suppose he didn’t want to press the point. Alex did.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked me. ‘Why now? You know they say that you shouldn’t make any major decisions within six months of somebody dying. Or is it within six months of winning the lottery? Something like that, anyway. I don’t think this is the best time to be making life-changing decisions. Imagine what Jules would say.’
‘Julian is gone,’ I said, bluntly. For some reason I couldn’t bear to hear her talk about him. I couldn’t bear to hear anyone talk about him.
‘Yes, I know Nic, but—’
‘Well stop bringing him up, then. This has nothing to do with him. This is about Dominic and me. And it’s time. I want to get married.’
Unlike Dom, Alex wasn’t prepared to let the subject drop just like that. A few days after I’d phoned her to tell her that Dom and I were getting married, she rang me to ask me to meet her for drinks at the Duke of York off Gray’s Inn Road.
‘I have to see my lawyer,’ she told me. ‘Always a horrible experience. I’ll need to get pissed afterwards.’
I didn’t want to go. Getting pissed with Alex wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. Plus, the weather was filthy, cold and wet, with a northern wind blasting through my corner of Brixton as though it were stuck out on some peninsula instead of being sheltered by the council blocks of the Loughborough estate.