My car’s an ancient Polo, totally incongruous amongst the sleek Mercedes and BMWs that line the road the fridge is on. The stupid nickname grates on me now: Judith was right, there was something so obviously awry for me to be undermining our first home together so slyly. I sit there, looking up at it, the sadness I’ve been holding at bay suddenly overwhelming. I’ve stifled it, swinging between whipping myself for my night with Patrick and whipping Marcus for being so callous and cut-off. Now, sitting here, I just think that we’re both a bit hopeless. We did have happy times, but somehow we couldn’t convert a handful of shiny beads into an heirloom-worthy necklace.
I feel sick with myself for what happened with Patrick, but there’s a reason it did. Ringing him yesterday – the first contact since he strode out of my bare flat without looking back – was savage.
‘Mia,’ he said, picking up on the first ring, his voice thick with something. Guilt? Regret? What was real and what was manipulation? I’ve obsessively tracked back over all our time together, trying to juice the truth from it, but I’ve lost too much faith in myself to make a diagnosis. I can only trust in empirical facts, one of which is that he’s made absolutely no contact with me since he got the information he so desperately sought.
‘This is a professional call,’ I said, my voice clipped. I had to keep the two things separate, my feelings vacuum-sealed. I couldn’t fail Gemma again. Couldn’t fail myself.
‘OK, fine,’ he said, his voice already hardening.
And I outlined what Gemma had told me, promising to scan my notes and email them over. Patrick took it all in, long fingers tapping furiously at his keyboard like a woodpecker, his quick, tense breaths audible down the phone.
‘Thanks a million for this.’
‘Yeah, seems like all your hard work finally paid off,’ I said, childish hurt finally getting the better of me.
‘It wasn’t—’
‘You don’t need to say anything else,’ I said, as icily as I could.
‘Mia?’ The way he said my name, it punctured me. ‘Firstly, I meant every word I said to you, and,’ he added, before I could jump in, ‘what do you think? Did you believe her?’
I paused. I hadn’t really and truly had time to think it through. Saying goodbye to her had felt so jagged – a goodbye amidst a chorus of other goodbyes – and then I’d distracted myself with the immediate aftermath. I’d spoken to Judith, got her blessing to make this call, then picked up the phone.
‘There was definitely truth in it,’ I said, then realized how airy-fairy that was, unhelpful to a police investigation. Like Patrick had said by the duck pond, he wasn’t after a sniff of my scented candles. ‘Yes. You know what, it sounds unlikely, and she can be a manipulative little . . .’ I stopped myself. Poor Gemma: the enormity of what she was going through felled me again. It was suddenly hard to speak. ‘But I do think it’s true.’
‘Thanks,’ he said, voice sombre. ‘Because I know how – how amazing you are at what you do. If you think it’s true, then—’
‘Yeah, Patrick, I am pretty amazing,’ I said, suddenly furious at everything I’d lost. Surely Annie would report me now – the person her daughter had chosen to confide in? And Patrick had turned the screws. ‘I’ve got to go. Good luck with it all.’
I’ve told the estate agent I’ll make sure all my boxes are stacked in the hall so the removals people can pick them up in one fell swoop tomorrow. I’m going to grab some clothes whilst I’m here, take them back to Mum’s, stop looking like the girl fashion forgot.
The door swings open into cavernous emptiness, the polished wooden floors gleaming. It’s a blank canvas, ready to be drawn on. Tears come now, a whole life I was about to step into abandoned. I can’t go back. I don’t want to go back. And yet . . . I need to grieve. I step into the living room, the walls punctuated by an enormous cinema screen of a TV that Marcus insisted on, and sink down onto one of my packing boxes. I sob, sob for all of it, wiping my runny nose and wet face on my sleeve, like a woeful toddler.
I don’t even hear the key in the lock, but I do hear that familiar tread. It’s funny, all the things you get to know about a person, which you don’t even know you know. There he is, framed in the doorway, bulky and definite.
‘Thought champagne would be a cliché,’ he says, holding up a bottle of white. I look up at him, my face wet and snotty, and he pulls a big cotton handkerchief from somewhere. He’s classy, Marcus: it was one of the things that first made me fancy him. He crouches down next to me, puts his arms around me. ‘Don’t cry,’ he says. He can’t stand seeing me cry, but trying not to always makes me cry harder. I lean into his suited chest, even though I don’t deserve the comfort.
‘Did the agent tell you I’d be here?’
‘Yeah. I thought it’d be better than a summit.’
I smile up at him, remembering that I love him. I love him, and yet it’s not enough somehow.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, the meaning bigger than the three little syllables. We look at each other, sober and quiet, and I nearly tell him everything. ‘I’m sorry I went off at the deep end. But you shouldn’t . . .’
He puts up a hand. It drives me crazy, the way he always dampens me down. I feel like an opera singer constantly denied her aria.
‘I know. I should’ve talked to you. But you’re always so bloody defensive. Whacking out your card all the time. What did you say? “I’m not your geisha”? I’d like to be able to look after you sometimes.’
‘It’s not about that though, is it?’ I say, jumping in. Then I pause a second, think about it. ‘It is a bit,’ I concede. ‘But it’s also because we can’t talk about anything hard or uncomfortable. You shut me down, and tell me not to cry. Or you get on a plane somewhere . . .’ He shrugs. Mea culpa. ‘Sometimes I feel like we don’t really know each other. Not properly.’
‘I like the way you keep something back. You’ve got a bit of mystery about you.’
Am I a palate cleanser, an antidote to the drudgery of decades of marriage, complete with the dirty nappies and conversations had so many times they’re like grooves in a vinyl record? I look round the bare, polished room, sadness bubbling up again. This was where it was meant to begin, our own version of normal.
‘Don’t you want us to see all the crappy, unattractive bits of each other too? Isn’t it lonely otherwise?’
Marcus looks at me, his smile laced with something I can’t quite name.
‘It’s the way I am, Mia. Real men don’t eat quiche? I don’t eat quiche.’
I smile at him, stroke his stubbly cheek, guilt torrenting through me as soon as my fingers graze it. It’s too late. I opened the door, and now I can’t shut it again.
‘I think you’re underestimating yourself,’ I say.
‘Maybe,’ he concedes.
‘The divorce too. You’re bruised. I never wanted to think about how soon after it was . . .’
‘It’s hard for you to understand all that. You haven’t gone there. I gave you all the certainty cos I knew you needed it, but when it came down to it, I knew how bad it could turn.’
‘So why didn’t you talk to me about that, rather than sending your progeny round with a legally binding contract?’
He shrugs, smiles down at me.
‘I’m going to open the wine,’ he says, ‘and you’re going to drink some, even if this is one of your sodding three days off.’
It used to drive him mad when we went to dinner on a Sunday, and I’d only managed two. I stick out a glass, smile back at him.
‘Fill her up.’
He looks back at me, sex in his eyes, always so gratifyingly quick to flare up, but I gently shake my head. He pulls out the cork with a satisfying pop, washes wine into my glass. It’s delicious, naturally.
‘Cheers,’ he says, and we knock glasses. Everything, every little thing, reverberates with my duplicity. I look down for a second, suddenly overwhelmingly grateful to Patrick for slamming on the brakes when he did. Marcus pulls up a packing case, sits down on it, turns to me; we’re two gnomes chewing the fat on our cardboard toadstools. I smile at the thought, almost kiss him. Instead I take his large, powerful hand, trace the palm with my fingers. I’m going to miss his hands.
‘Talk to me,’ I say.
‘I should’ve talked to you, you’re right. But you’re actually quite hard to reach, despite your fancy qualifications—’
‘So are you,’ I say, too fast.
He holds up his other hand.
‘I know. But also, I might just not talk the way you want me to talk. I don’t talk quiche . . . And, you’ve been different recently, Mia. You’re not really here. I know you’re stressed about your mum, but it’s more than that, isn’t it?’
And then I start to cry again, tears streaming down my raw face. He pulls me close, dries them with his hankie, listens as I tell him about my suspension, about the bare bones of Gemma, about how hard it’s been to surf the waves of a set of circumstances so far outside my comfort zone. And of course, as soon as I get close to the case, I start to hate myself for the fact I’m leaning into his broad chest, soaking up his murmured words of kindness and reassurance.
‘There’s so much I can’t tell you, but there’s something I really should . . .’
He holds up his hand again.
‘Don’t, Mia.’ His voice is fierce. ‘I don’t need this bit.’
His eyes are dark and flat, a slammed metal door. He means it.
‘OK,’ I say, my voice small.
His gaze softens as he looks at me.
‘You don’t want this. I could fight for you, but I’m not going to do that.’
‘Do you want it?’
‘It’s enough for me. It’s not enough for you.’
So simple. So true. We don’t always need quiche. I hold his face without letting guilt poison my touch, look into his eyes to signal he’s right and avoid a tortured explanation. He leans in, kisses me, and I lose myself in it, this last and final kiss.
‘I don’t want to lose you from my life,’ I tell him as we stand up, holding hands.
‘Give it some time,’ he says with a rueful grin. ‘Man’s got his pride.’
‘I mean it. It’s not some stupid platitude.’
‘I know. So do I.’ He looks down at me. ‘You’re lovely. Fucking exasperating, but you’re lovely. I always knew it’d be hard to keep you.’
‘Marcus, women hurl their knickers at you all the time—’
‘Don’t,’ he says, a note of warning in his voice. ‘Besides, it’s not a numbers game.’
‘I know.’
We pause for a minute, surrounded by bareness and boxes, a strange sort of wasteland.
‘You want me to help put a couple of these in the car?’
‘That’d be great.’
He lugs mine into a neatly arranged cube, ever the architect, then hauls a couple down the stairs for me. I watch his retreating back, his broad shoulders, his confident stride. Am I crazy to let him keep walking? For some inexplicable reason I can’t do anything else.
I don’t know why I’m here. I might as well have boiled his pet rabbit and had done with it. I’m parked up outside the police station, in view of the door, Radio 3 playing through the tinny car speakers in an effort to calm my thumping heart. I want to thank him, to apologize, to wish him God speed for tomorrow. What I should do is pick up the phone like a grown-up, instead of lurking in the shadows, but I’m too frightened of how his voice might sound. At least if I could see him . . . He’s probably not even here. He’s probably in some sticky-floored pub, a coquettish twentysomething with a lawyer fetish laughing a bit too hard at his jokes.
It must be an hour I wait, my heart leaping every time the door swings open. Then I give up, turn the rusty key in the ignition and head for home.