I don’t know precisely when I realized that I was developing a crush on Ness. These things happen so slowly. Looking back, it was probably the time we went for that long hike outside Bath somewhere. Do you know the Bath countryside, Dr Robinson? You should go. I was struck by how fearless, how in control Ness was, with the Ordnance Survey map on her phone, her sensible boots and her blue cagoule. I found myself quite content to follow those slender striding legs into the unknown and was enjoying this strange new feeling of being second in command. A strange thought kept occurring to me: If I was a man this is exactly the sort of woman I would fall in love with.
The trip was unplanned. Now that the kids were a bit older Ness had got a job managing a gallery on the South Bank – she was doing really well and had been sent out to visit an artist in Bristol to discuss an upcoming exhibition. The night before the trip she’d sprained her wrist playing netball. Leah had work commitments, so she’d asked if I was free to drive her there and back. I was free (I was procrastinating doing research for my book). Besides, it was just for the day and I know she would have done the same for me.
Initially, as we left London in the old RAV4, it had felt a little peculiar; Ness and I had always passed our time together in the comfortable context of our families and here we were: individuals again, in the big wide world, just two women in a car going on a journey. Within the familial context, we’d all grown closer, thanks to the kids dashing in and out of our houses without the reserve of adults. They’d broken all the barriers for us, resulting in many impromptu evenings spent together. Karl was unusual like that – he was perfectly happy in the company of women (as long as he was the centre of attention); he had lots of women friends; he genuinely liked women. And Leah and Ness were unusual in that they had quite a few straight male friends. And you know what? I’d even seen Ness being quite flirty with them – I suppose being in a lesbian relationship allowed her that safety.
Leah’s brother and Karl had met and got on like a house on fire; they supported the same football team, knew a few characters in common. (What is it with men and characters? Why are they so eager to lay claim to them? Is it that they think a little of this character will rub off on them?) We knew Ness and Leah’s story by now: the kids’ biological father was a gay friend of theirs who now lived in France and Ness was the biological mother. Their past interested me: Leah had always been gay but Ness had only been in heterosexual relationships until they met; she’d been with her ex-boyfriend for five years. I assumed she must have always had a sexual interest in women, but she waved away my comments: I just fell in love and it happened to be with a woman.
I became quite fascinated by how they functioned as a couple, eager to pin them down and define them in some way, wanting them to take on traditional gender roles, which they did to a degree. In some respects Leah was the more masculine partner: she wasn’t vain, she never wore make-up when she wasn’t on television, she never wore skirts, she was sporty and practical, she got drunk like a man, loud and leery. And Ness looked after Leah, shielding her from the public interest, buoying her up, batting away the depression that never seemed far from Leah’s surface. Ness was somehow more sensible than Leah, more responsible. Apart from being gay, she was surprisingly straight. And yet every now and then she would take me by surprise: she was partial to a spliff, she could stay up all night, she had no qualms about breaking wind (a gentle inoffensive gust, but nevertheless she was unabashed); there was a subversiveness in there somewhere.
The journey flew by as we gossiped. Ness had plugged in her phone and was playing a Rufus Wainwright track; she’d unwound the window and was leaning out to feel the wind in her face. ‘Going to a Town’ – do you know it, Dr R? If not, Spotify it right now and think of us in the car, windows down, London behind us, singing along lustily to Rufus. It was one of those moments of happiness that seem to belong to a different lifetime now. I am smiling to recall it. I may not have been blessed with a melodious voice, but I’d been top of the queue when they were handing out gusto. Ness, however, had a sweet voice (I know, I know, what doesn’t she have?). It transpired that she’d actually met Mr Wainwright at some celebrity do with Leah. As I said, she was cool in her straight way, Dr R, or are you impervious to such things? I think not.
I don’t want to bang on about Ness’s beauty because I despise this whole beauty obsession, but I have to say, after initially having been oblivious to it, I was now continually left-fielded by it: we’d be chatting away about human motivation or medieval doctors or the extraordinary Caravaggio (her favourite), and I would get distracted by the gorgeous tone of her skin, or those large dark eyes, or those unnaturally red lips – the sort that Shakespeare would eulogize about (where did that extra blood come from?), or her perfect teeth, or the petiteness of her, those high cheekbones, those full breasts. Nature had been a little unfair on the donating front; I felt crudely crafted next to her. Don’t get me wrong: she wasn’t perfect but it would be mean to point out that perhaps her hair was a little too frizzy, or her fingers on the stumpy side, or her skin a little moley – all that was lost in the glory of the whole. There was something undeniably feminine about her and yet she had a solidity, a capability, an appetite, an athleticism which was quite masculine.
At this stage I wasn’t consciously smitten with her; I was still representing myself quite well. I had yet to be skinned, deboned and filleted. And I don’t want to give you the wrong impression – I was smart and cool and pretty impressive in my own way (there is no room for false modesty in these records, wouldn’t you agree?). No, I’d never doubted my own attractiveness; it had never been an issue for me, but she was in a different league.
It’s surprising how much dancing can be done in a car. The Temptations were bemoaning frustrated love. Lyrics don’t come much better than theirs. It turned out, to our mutual delight, that we were both pedants on the lyric front, agreeing that a bad lyric could ruin a musician’s whole oeuvre; personally, I had never forgiven Prince for slipping the word restaurant into an otherwise faultless song. It’s kind of inexcusable; the word had no business in a lyric at all. I’m digressing. My point is – it’s an intimate act, sharing music, not dissimilar to Polly and Annie sharing diary dates. There is an element of risk in exposing your tastes but Ness and I appeared to be of one mind. If we quibbled about a song it wasn’t a problem: we’d persuade or dissuade, pause the track, debate a lyric, look for consistency, laugh or change our minds; we were in harmony.
Ness did what she had to do in Bristol and I wandered around, had a sandwich by the canal, read my book with a coffee. And then we left to go back home. We could probably have made it in time for supper. But on the way, we got completely pelted by rain on the M4 and one of my windscreen wipers broke. It was quite dangerous – I could see nothing and we were in the fast lane at the time – but she was cool-headed, flagging the cars around us until I got us safely on to the hard shoulder, my legs a-tremble. She put her hand on my thigh and soothed me. I can’t describe it, Dr R, but I felt looked after with her, in a way that I didn’t with Karl. Yes, if I was a man, she was just the sort of woman I would fall in love with.
We called the AA and our partners and waited in the rain.
Looking back, what happened next seems entirely random. The AA arrived quickly and towed us for miles to some garage in the Bath countryside. It turned out they would have to order a special windscreen wiper (who knew such a thing existed?) which wouldn’t turn up until the next day – if we were lucky.
So, there we were, stuck in the middle of nowhere. We had an empty slate. So we made the relevant phone calls home, organized the necessary childcare, and then found a surprisingly pleasant inn on the edge of the village recommended by the mechanic – an establishment favoured by walkers: low beams, flagstone floor, roaring log fire. The only room they had available was a double, which neither of us was bothered about. So we found ourselves drinking pints of local ale sitting by the log fire, feeling rather elated at the surprising turn of events. We were on our second round when Karl’s texts started beeping through: Where are Josh’s shin pads? Annie can’t find her blue wig? You haven’t bought any washing tablets. How do you switch the dishwasher on?
Ness was utterly incredulous that he didn’t know how to use the machines. I wasn’t. I saw it as a deliberate ploy. Karl was a grand master of lethargy; he’d made uselessness a tool in his bid for idleness. Most insultingly of all, he must have thought I didn’t see through it. How, after years, could he still not manage to load the dishwasher with the plates at the right angle so the branch didn’t get stuck? (Can Si Hubby do that, Dr R?) Or take the washing out of the machine immediately, so that it doesn’t smell of old drains, and hang it out on the line in such a way that it won’t need ironing? How could he not master these tiny, simple things when I have mentioned them four thousand times? I’ll tell you why: because his overriding aim has been for me to have to redo everything, so that he can throw his hands in the air, flagellate with hurt and despair, and cry, Whatever I do, Connie, it’s never quite good enough for you, is it? As if it were my fault for wanting our fucking clothes to be clean and for him not to stink like a damp dog. He and I had always brought equal amounts of money into the house. At what stage during our relationship did I sign up to be the domestic slave?
You asked me if I was ever jealous? I’ll tell you what makes me jealous: the sharing of domestic tasks. Imagine this: walking past the chest of drawers where you’ve left a pile of clean laundry and to find that someone else has put it away! That is foreplay in my book. To return home to a wiped table! That is nigh on orgasmic. You know what? Leah doesn’t leave pee on the toilet seat, she tidies up the sofa before she goes to bed, and she reads the fucking news on the BBC. Yes! I’m jealous!
I’m working myself up into a state but you must understand, Dr R – maybe you do: it is these little slacknesses that kill relationships; that are the steady crunch of the woodworm, eating away at what might have been a sound structure.
We carried on drinking beer, ate a hearty meal – interestingly, Ness and I (unlike you, with your horse-food calorie-controlled nut bars) are in that minority of women who have never weighed ourselves or been on diets, which automatically eliminates an awful lot of those deeply tedious conversations I hear other women have – and crashed out, bloated and bulging, in the pillow-plumped four-poster bed.
The next morning we sat at the bleached wooden breakfast table, the whiff of toast in the air, the clink of white crockery and the rustle of newspapers. It was all Gucci, as Josh would say. At ten-thirty we rang the garage to be told that the windscreen wiper wouldn’t be arriving until the following morning. After a minute or so of disbelief that our journey should be hindered by a windscreen wiper – it was technically illegal to drive without one, according to our mechanic, and it was looking like rain – neither of us actually minded that much; we were on an unexpected and welcome break from the old routine. My deadline for an article was not for another few days and Ness’s boss was very amenable. We made the necessary calls home, got talking to a couple on the next table, and decided to go on a walk – a proper walk. Ness, as ever sensibly clad, was already wearing her walking boots and I had some trainers in the back of the car. So we took photos of the couple’s Ordnance Survey map and pored over the route as we ate our porridge and boiled eggs. We decided on an eight-mile circular route to the lake and back. This was fun. In a way, I felt like I’d been waiting for Ness all my life: an accomplice, an adventurer, a partner in carpe diem.
The proprietor of the inn lent us a backpack and offered us some wellies, which we refused. I watched the way Ness efficiently packed the bag: water bottle, some Kendal Mint Cake that she’d bought at the counter, the way she carefully rolled up her blue Norwegian cagoule (the type that people die in on Mount Everest) and neatly stuffed it down the side. She methodically figured out how all the compartments worked. She was thorough. ‘If I’d known I’d have brought my compass. Have you got a waterproof?’ she asked me. I saw a new side to her: she was the tiniest bit bossy but I really didn’t mind; in fact I was enjoying being bossed. Besides, it was a rarity for me not to ask three hundred times whether everyone had been for a pee, brought a jumper, etc. I only had myself to ask today.
I didn’t have a waterproof.
‘Not in the back of the car?’ she asked me, surprised. I bet at home she had a proper hiking bag with a first-aid kit and a pouch where she kept her compass, a flare and a couple of crampons; unlike me with my strappy handbag, lippy and a couple of tampons.
We stopped at the garage, where she exchanged pleasantries with the mechanic while I put on the trainers and my Topshop bomber jacket, looking like an idiotic townie. Pathetic really – but in the event of an air ambulance rescue service at least I would look good.
Luckily for me, the weather turned out to be glorious (which actually meant we could easily have driven home). And the Bath countryside was magnificent.
We’d met each other late in life and we had a lot of catching up to do, so we decided we would tell each other our stories, interview each other, cover every stage of life, not necessarily in order. Whatever the interviewer wanted to ask they could ask; no questions were out of bounds, nothing was sacred. What was said in the Bath countryside stayed in the Bath countryside. That was our motto. I was to be interviewed until we got to the lake and she was to be interviewed on the way back.
We followed the river along the flatter land. Ness was so sure of herself and her map reading and I continued to enjoy being led. She knew about the Jurassic rock and the evolution of the land itself (her father was a geography teacher). We marvelled at the trees, which were shrieking reds and golds at us. It felt more like June than September and soon it became so warm that we stuffed our jumpers into the backpack. She checked her phone with the pictures of the OS map every time we came to a stile or a fork in the path. Already I was dependent on her; why was she the one carrying the backpack, holding the phone? But I liked the way she was a bit nerdy, the way she referred to the map, knowing what all the symbols meant, her finger following the dotted red line. Initially I wanted to double-check every decision made – I was used to being prime navigator of my tribe, after all – but I soon surrendered entirely to her control. And it felt good being dominated; a new and perhaps feminine feeling that I wasn’t quite used to. I was giving myself over in a way I hadn’t for many years.
So, I was the first to tell my story. Once we’d crossed the river, we began in earnest. She wanted to start with the meeting of my parents, so a couple of hours later, by the time we’d got to the top of the peak, I’d gone through the birth of my brother David, my own entry to the world, my early schooling, the important characters from my childhood, friends – she asked me a lot of questions about my greatest friends, Grace and Ally – the teenage years, my brief first marriage. Her questions were poignant but sensitive, her curiosity sharp. She was a great interviewer, able to keep the flow going, pull it back on track, create links and point out patterns, all the while handing me little bits of Kendal Mint Cake and glugs of water.
We were walking along the top of the dyke when we glimpsed the lake. It was as blue as the sky and took our breath away. It was wonderful to walk with someone who really felt the force of nature. It was a real connection. Karl was strangely impervious to nature; whether we were watching bursts of lava spewing from Etna, or just the last of the sun going down, I’d have to point the spectacle out, draw his focus. He’d stop and look and try to be impressed, because he knew he was meant to be feeling something. And the gap between us would increase. Then he would bring us close again with a joke, almost apologizing for his lack of wonder. I wish I’d brought my watercolours. We’d found a way that worked: we substituted laughter for connection. And so laughter became our connection, which in its own way is wonderful. But with Ness it was different. She and I spoke the same language: we both stopped and looked at the lake at exactly the same time, just because we both did.
By the time we reached it, we were boiling; we took our socks and shoes off and sat at the edge with our feet dangling in the water, basking in the warm sunshine. There wasn’t a soul about. I splashed the icy water on to my face and hair and we ate the last of the Kendal Mint Cake. Then Ness sat up abruptly, rummaged in the backpack and pulled out her cagoule, unzipped a pocket and produced the remnants of a fat spliff and a lighter.
‘Yes!’ she said. ‘I knew I had it! Leah and I smoked half of this last week!’
Weed had gone out of fashion for some reason – parenthood had made cokeheads out of everyone. (Well, smoking’s so bad for your health, isn’t it, Dr R?) She passed it under my nose and then lit up. This was a moment of bliss, the sort you crave for when you’re stuck on a crowded tube.
We lay in the grass in an easy silence, our toes flicking the water, feeling the warm sun on our skin; bees and buzzing things meandering by, dropping in to see whether we were worth pollinating. I watched an eagle hovering above high in the sky and felt Ness shift on to her elbow at my side. She was close; I could smell her. She smelt of me. Me without the body odour. She passed me the spliff.
‘When you met Karl, did you know straight away he was the one?’
I took a drag and softly blew the thick smoke out before turning to look at her.
‘I’m not sure I believe in the one.’
She looked momentarily crushed. I didn’t like myself for it: it’s so easy to make people feel small. Yet my response gave away more than she heard, don’t you think?
‘I was still busy thinking I’d found the one in someone else,’ I said, to make amends. She looked at me in that particular way she had, out of the corners of her eyes. It was alluring. ‘It’s funny how things work out,’ I continued. ‘The decisions you never consciously make. When I met Karl, I certainly wasn’t looking to get involved with anyone. But he was like a breath of fresh air. Then he kind of set me in his sights.’ I smiled to remember how, in those early days, he would turn up uninvited wherever I went. I was unfriendly, my brother was blatantly rude to him – he’d come over from Australia for a family reunion – but Karl never took offence. His pursuit was relentless. (In your profession you might call it stalking, but it veered just to the right side of it.) ‘And he was so funny! I couldn’t not be charmed by him.’
‘Yes, he is charming,’ she said. She had a slight edge to her voice so that I couldn’t tell what she meant by that, whether she was being critical of him. I hoped not. I wanted her to be charmed by him; I wanted her onside.
‘He’d been brought in by this magazine I was writing for; they were hiring and firing at the top. I was asked to show him around. We ended up having lunch together and he asked me out. We went on a few dates and soon it became apparent that we had similar outlooks on life, we both wanted the same things … it was all so easy. There was no reason not to be with him.’ I laughed, feeling a wave of incredible fondness for Karl. (Interesting how we shape our own narratives to fit our stories. You mustn’t take my version for the truth – I’m sure you don’t.) For some reason I failed to mention to Ness that Karl had been a serial Lothario and during those first few months together I discovered at least three other women who thought they were going out with him. (Is this perhaps what kept me keen? Win the competition then let the cup gather dust? I hope I’m not that petty, but I might be.) I know why I didn’t tell her: I didn’t want to see her incredulity or hear her disapproval. I was protective of him, of us.
Ness was leaning on her elbow, facing me, one breast leaning heavily on the other. I took another drag.
‘Then I found out I was pregnant … No, hang on, I’m missing something out. It was still early days when something really shit happened to him and I was just there, you know … it sort of made us a couple in other people’s eyes …’
She was chewing on another piece of grass, her legs tucked forward a little, droplets of water caught on her calves, her hip bones jutting out through her jeans, her slender arms resting against the curve of her body.
‘What happened?’ she asked, because she could. These were the rules. I shifted position, leaning on my elbow and mirroring hers.
‘He doesn’t talk about it, actually, so don’t bring it up.’
‘I won’t.’
‘He was driving in north London somewhere and he knocked someone over. This woman. She died later in hospital.’ (You’d have a minefield with him, Dr R.)
‘Oh, good heavens!’ Ness said. She often used rather sweet, old-fashioned expressions. ‘How awful.’ She covered her mouth with her hand.
‘Yes.’
‘How awful for him.’
‘As I said, don’t mention it, will you?’
‘I wouldn’t.’
I passed her the spliff. ‘It wasn’t his fault. It was a young woman. She was having a row with someone and walked out without looking and bam …’
‘My goodness! Poor Karl.’ This was the first time I’d heard her have empathy for him and I liked it. Sometimes I felt that she didn’t really trust him in some way.
‘He went into a kind of shock and then he just refused to speak about it … he still won’t get in a Citroën,’ I said.
‘He’s such a happy sort of person,’ she said, somewhat incongruously. She sat up and folded her arms around her knees. I looked at her lovely smooth back. Her hair was up and some of it had fallen down. If I was a man I’m pretty sure I’d fall in love with you.
She turned and passed the spliff back to me.
‘Is it hard, living with someone like Leah?’ I asked her.
‘You mean the fame? Or Ms Misery Guts?’ She smiled, looking round at me. I meant the latter; she knew that. ‘I suppose I’m so used to it. I don’t think I could bear someone endlessly cheery. They’d get on my tits.’
Again, I took this as a slight dig at Karl, who had a peculiar habit of being relentlessly chipper in groups. He wasn’t really like that in private. It was as though he had two distinct personas. In public he was Mr Joke-A-Minute, filling silences with whistled snatches of lift music. She was absolutely right: it really could get on your tits. I didn’t mind it getting on my tits but I didn’t want it getting on other people’s tits, if you see what I mean, Dr R (maybe because it would reflect badly on me?). I wanted Ness to like Karl. We always want our female friends to like our partners in just the right way.
‘Have you ever been depressed?’ I asked. I was curious.
‘Umm …’ she said, but she shrugged her shoulders and had to think about it. No one likes to confess to not having felt depressed because that makes them seem insensitive and superficial, but on the other hand no one likes to say that they’ve been Prozacked up to the eyeballs, waking up wailing every morning at the prospect of another twenty-four hours to live through, because that makes them sound unhinged. You have to have felt just the right amount of misery to be socially acceptable to the Establishment, don’t you agree?
‘I always think of all the people who have it much worse than I do.’
I blew the blue smoke up into the blue sky. Yes, I could believe she did that. There was a slightly Edwina Currie-ish side to her, a no-nonsense, put-on-an-extra-jumper kind of mentality. It was the opposite of indulgent and I liked that, but it showed a thickness of skin that I’d noticed elsewhere in her character. Leah could be openly rude to her and it was like it meant nothing; she never reacted. She’d brush it off, seemingly unaffected. I would have been incredibly hurt or angry had someone spoken to me that way. Other people’s relationships are anathema – face it, Doc.
I was envious of her too: of her mental strength. How wonderful not to have been to those dark places. It probably just wasn’t in her nature. I liked that about her – she was straightforward. You’d know best, but I’ve come to believe that it’s in the DNA, that self-destruct button; you’re either suicidal or you’re not. It doesn’t mean that you’ve gone any lower than anyone else; it’s just the way your brain is programmed to deal with things. To some of us, death feels like an attractive, proactive solution to a problem. And at the time it appears to be by far the more sensible alternative to carrying on. It seems quite obvious to me that risk-takers are more likely to chuck it all in. My first suicide attempt happened at fifteen. I got pregnant the first time I had sex and it truly felt like the end of the world. I went to the bathroom cabinet in my parents’ house and swallowed every pill I could find in the cupboard. Sadly for me, they were old hippies and it turned out I’d OD’d on tree bark and ginseng.
‘I was on antidepressants,’ I told her, just because I felt like it. ‘After Annie’s birth, I took a dip.’ She didn’t really react or appear to judge me. Thank God there’s not quite the same stigma attached that there used to be.
We were both lying back on the grass, looking up at the sky, pretty stoned now, talking about cause and effect, accidents and fate, serendipity and coincidence. We were watching the eagle and the eagle seemed to be watching us. It kept swooping and climbing – we reckoned it was getting the odd waft of sweet sinsemilla up there, had the old rabbit-munchies and was boring the arse off the other eagles. We chuckled away for a while before drifting off into our own worlds.
‘What was this guy like you were in love with?’ she said, her voice breaking my reverie. I paused.
‘Which guy?’
‘The guy before Karl. You said you thought you’d found the one.’
I sighed. That guy. My God, how do you describe it, Dr R? Have you had it? Did Si Hubby make you feel as if you’d been half asleep all your life? Did he wake you up and fill you to the brim? Have you suffered from that particular madness? Or wasn’t it Si Hubby at all?
‘I’d known him years ago. He’d been my professor at uni. But then I bumped into him a few years later at a party and … it was … it was complicated.’
She was inhaling and turned her head to me with a raised eyebrow. ‘You mean he was married.’
I raised an eyebrow back at her. ‘It turned out he was, yes.’
‘How long were you together?’
‘On and off for four years.’
She whistled a bit and lay there looking up at the sky. ‘I bet you had cracking sex.’
I laughed. ‘We did.’ We really did. I watched Ness stretch herself out, her arms over her head. She had rolled up the sleeves of her T-shirt and I was momentarily distracted by the curve of her breast against the side of her body.
‘Wouldn’t it be great if we were allowed just one day of pure passion, to shag our brains out, with no repercussions or consequences?’ she said with a sigh. For a moment I thought she was talking about us, her and me, and my heart surprised me when it did a little cha-cha-cha.
‘Who would you do it with?’ I asked. (Yes, in my book, that is flirting. What do you think?)
‘I don’t know. Whoever floated my boat.’
The sky seemed to prickle with stars despite the daylight.
‘Would you call yourself bisexual?’ I asked her.
‘I don’t like all these labels.’
‘Don’t you miss sex with men?’
She looked at me and shrugged. ‘No.’
‘You and Leah have a good sex life though, don’t you?’ I asked. Seeing as she’d opened the portal to this conversation, I stepped right in. I’d always assumed that they had, but now I thought about it, I hadn’t seen much affection between them recently.
‘Yeah,’ she said loyally, but I heard the doubt in her voice. Well, you can’t say no, can you, Dr R? ‘You and Karl?’ she asked.
‘Yeah,’ I said, because I was a liar too. ‘But let’s just say I might have to brush a few cobwebs off the old French maid outfit at the back of the cupboard.’
She sat up on an elbow and stared at me. ‘Do you dress up?’ She looked really flabbergasted. I told you, there was a touch of Edwina about her. But I also liked this about her, that she thought dressing up ridiculous. It suddenly felt very feminist and empowering not to appeal to men’s fantasies. And yet, on the other hand, it seemed to me that there was an element of imagination missing from her make-up. (What about you? Do you carry on playing doctors and nurses when you get home? Does Si Hubby like a bit of sexy Santa?)
Ness was staring at me, waiting for an answer. ‘No! I’m serious! Do you?’ she repeated.
‘I used to,’ I said. Karl was into all that dressing up when we started. ‘He has particular tastes. For example, he likes white underwear. It has to be white.’ I kid you not, Dr R – he gives me some every birthday. To be honest, I don’t really consider that a proper present, do you? He might as well give me a QPR season ticket.
‘My God, I can’t believe you dress up!’ Ness cried, shaking her head, laughing with disbelief. ‘Not me, no way, I can’t bear any of that stuff. I’d just feel utterly ridiculous dressed as a schoolgirl or … or … what do you wear?’ she asked, an uncomprehending grin on her face, the whole concept unfathomable to her.
I started laughing. ‘Well, I used to have a kind of bunny girl thing …’
She burst out laughing now. We both did – we were pretty wrecked. We got up and started hopping about pulling our best fuck-me bunny faces. Which reminds me, Dr R, some free sex advice you can pass on to your clients: if you’re on all fours, taking it from behind, never ever turn around and try to look sexy. It’s not going to work. Ness and I proved it: we tried every angle we could and it really is impossible to look good. But it is hilarious to try.
We laughed until the jokes slowly petered out, and the birdsong and the buzz of the insects took over. Then we thought perhaps it was time to carry on our walk and we started getting our things together, without much success: I found her intently studying the map upside down. She pointed out that I had two socks on one foot. Eventually we did get our acts together and headed off again.
‘So,’ she said, after a little while; we were walking alongside the lake, ready to veer off. ‘What was his name, this professor?’
I wonder what percentage of happily married people still have a small place in their hearts reserved for someone other than their partner. Not in a real way – they would never do anything about it, their lives are good – but in a fantasy way. Are you any good on stats? I’ll tell you a secret: this man was capable of reducing me to nothing, to just an essence of being. You lot probably have a name for it, a condition, don’t you? Or is it just falling in love? I was glad I wasn’t that person any more. I did not want that kind of love again. I had lost myself in him. And then, when he went, he left a hole in me. I filled it up with concrete. I hardened up. I have rock in me now. Everyone tells me that.
‘Jonathan Hapgood.’ Saying his name was like lifting a buried artefact out of the mud into the light. Not necessarily a good thing – think of the curse of Tutankhamen.
‘Jonathan Hapgood,’ she repeated. How exciting to hear his name on her lips. The spliff had made me indulgent, for you must understand I was very happy with my life, with Karl, with my kids, with the choices I had made. That soft melting love was no basis for rearing a family. Families needed solidity. I had a past – that was all.
‘What happened with Mr Hapgood?’ she asked, looking at me in that sideways way she had.
‘Oh,’ I said carelessly. ‘He finished it in the end. I’ve heard since that his wife went off with someone else.’
‘What goes around comes around. Do you still see him?’ she asked.
‘God, no. I’ve not seen him for nearly ten years.’
She turned to look at me. ‘Are you still in touch?’
‘No.’
‘Not at all?’
‘New Year’s Eve text maybe. Birthday email.’
‘But you still think about him.’ She was so insistent and probing.
I sighed. ‘Occasionally.’
She was drinking from the water bottle as we began to head onwards. ‘Like when?’
I felt guilty, disloyal, but also strangely free. I had never spoken of these things. ‘I don’t know. Actually I thought of him earlier, looking at this,’ I said, gesturing to the hills, the lake, the majesty of the place. ‘Or sometimes if I hear particular music … the usual corny old tosh. Anyway, it’s your turn now.’ I wanted to stop talking about me. I felt unnecessarily exposed, like I was having one of those naked dreams. I had said too much, made a bigger deal out of something than it was. Perhaps I needed to explain myself. ‘Sometimes, Ness, I think it’s because I’m not very good at letting go; I’m a fiercely loyal person. If I love someone I never stop loving them. Men, girlfriends … I have never fallen out with anyone …’ (I realize that I was self-aggrandizing, making myself sound a bit special, that my loyalty was to blame, not my fickleness.)
We were walking side by side now and she laughed and took my arm in her hands. ‘Constance – that is your name, after all. Don’t worry! You’re not being disloyal. I think you could be the most honest person I’ve ever met.’
It gave me a thrill to hear her say that and to see her looking at me in that particular way, although I have always believed that honesty is vastly overrated. (Loyalty, on the other hand …) Her hand was soft against my skin and she let her fingers stroke my inner arm all the way down to my hand, which she squeezed. ‘Besides,’ she said, ‘there are lots of different kinds of love.’
Men will never understand the beautiful intimacies of female friendship.