We arrange to meet in the café of the National Gallery. Leaving the office shortly before eleven, I make sure that I am there first, arranging myself at a table near the back, so that I have a full view of the entrance and can watch for his arrival. Already, I’m feeling twitchy and defensive, wary of getting caught out by any surprises. It’s noisy in here, the acoustics bouncing the sounds around as the tables fill up with a morning-coffee crowd. I might have chosen some small tucked-away-in-a-corner café, soft furnishings absorbing the sounds, our knees pressed close together beneath the table. The thought turns my stomach. I have chosen this place because it is bright and airy and loud. Because there will be witnesses. I realize that I am nervous of being alone with him.
A group of women and their children are at the next table – two of them are breastfeeding their babies. One of the mothers is grappling with her toddler, trying to get him to sit in the baby-chair. He’s resisting strongly, arching his back and shrieking while she attempts to grab hold of his feet and yank them into the slots. It’s clear she’s in danger of losing it with this kid, and the other mums are politely pretending not to notice as her handling of the child grows rough and insistent. The toddler’s mouth opens wide, a rusk-filled maw of indignant refusal, his mother’s eyes two black beads of fury. That’s going to be me, I think, with a jolt of panic, the thread in my belly twanging in a minor key. And then someone moves to interrupt my view, and I hear a familiar voice saying: ‘Hello, Faye.’
Despite all my preparations, he still manages to startle me.
‘Michael –’
‘God, it’s good to see you!’ he exclaims, making a sudden darting movement towards me. Realizing he’s going to kiss my cheek, I give a swift shake of my head, a gesture that signifies a clear no. He draws back and the smile that has lit up his face falls a little, replaced by a brief confused expression.
‘I don’t have long,’ I say, my tone neutral, a little cold. ‘We should make this quick.’
My arms are folded on the table. There’s a stiffness to my posture, a formality that is studied and deliberate. There’s a decaf latte by my right elbow, alongside it the leatherbound notebook I use for work, my iPhone sitting on top of it. Anyone looking might assume this to be a work meeting. I need him to understand that this is not some friendly catch-up. There’ll be no teary-eyed nostalgia, no wistful reminiscences. My single intention is to put a stop to his harassment and I want there to be no ambiguity.
‘You’ve already got a coffee, I see,’ he remarks, then inclines his head back towards the serving counters: ‘Mind if I grab one?’
‘Go ahead.’
I keep my gaze on him, watching as he walks head down towards the coffee station and takes his place in the small queue. What I’d observed from the distance of my car the other day is now confirmed. He’s older and heavier, and there’s a slump to his posture that wasn’t there before. The unfamiliar beard looks scraggly and unkempt – it doesn’t suit him, blurring the definition of his face. ‘You could slice apples on those cheekbones,’ I had told him once, running my fingers along the high ridges of his face. Teasing him and yet marvelling at his beauty too – a handsomeness made striking by the vividness of his bone structure. All of that has disappeared now, swallowed up by the beard and the flesh.
I don’t feel afraid. Even the nerves that had played on my stomach have diminished. Watching him at the till, parsing the coins on his palm, what I feel is closer to embarrassment. There’s something cringing about him. Is this really the same youth that I had loved? With a jolt of memory, I’m struck by the image of the two of us lying on a bed, the sheets bunched around us, our bodies naked and spent. It almost makes me shudder to think of it, to acknowledge that there was once intimacy between me and this man lumbering back across the room, his gaze held by the tray he carries. Impossible to believe that under those clothes lies the same flesh, the same skin, the same beating heart I had listened to through the wall of his chest. Despite the summer day, he’s wearing a brown suede jacket. I remember this jacket, although the suede looks worn to a shine in places and one of the buttons is dangling loose on its thread. By contrast, I am wearing one of my more formal summer suits – coral linen, with a white sleeveless blouse underneath. On the floor by my feet is a handbag in stiff black leather – Ed calls it my Thatcher bag – it’s expensive, as are my high-heeled shoes. Everything I’m wearing today was chosen to semaphore the changes in me. I want Michael, when he looks at me, to see a woman he doesn’t know. All traces of the girl he once loved obliterated. Nothing familiar at all.
He takes the seat opposite, puts his tray down. On it there’s a pot of tea, a scone, little plastic containers of jam and butter sliding around the plate, and he spends a moment moving each item from the tray on to the table; then, tucking his chair in close, he picks up a knife and cuts the scone in two, takes the foil from the butter. Something fussy about all this arranging, even though his hands are larger than I remember. I notice that his fingers have swelled, the nails are torn-looking, and there’s a graze across the knuckles of his right hand which makes me think he must work as some kind of labourer.
‘You can have half,’ he tells me, spreading jam on the scone. ‘I won’t eat all of this.’
‘I’m fine. Really.’
‘We always shared a scone with our coffees, do you remember? We’d meet at eleven in Hilpers and we’d always get a scone.’ He beams at me unselfconsciously and I see the sliver of a gap between his front teeth. It does something to me.
‘I don’t any more.’
His eyes pass quickly over me, taking in my hair, my clothes. Even though the weather is hot, I’ve kept my jacket buttoned to conceal the new thickening around my waist.
‘I knew one day you’d come back,’ he tells me. ‘I knew it.’ His eyes return to the plate in front of him, but he makes no attempt to pick up the scone. His fingers reach under the cuff of his sleeve to scratch at the skin there, and he continues: ‘All those things you told me in that phone conversation, when you rang me a few days after leaving Barcelona – about how we couldn’t see each other again, about the need to keep away – I always knew that one day you’d change your mind. That one day you’d see the sense of it. That you’d feel –’
‘Michael,’ I say firmly, interrupting him, ‘I agreed to meet you today so that I could tell you to your face that this must stop.’
‘What?’
‘All of this. The text messages, the letters, the phone calls – I want you to stop. I want you to leave me alone.’
‘Leave you alone?’ He laughs, but it feels forced, a jittery energy emanating from him.
‘I want you to stop contacting me. This meeting today is so that I can make it clear to you that I have no interest in pursuing any kind of friendship with you. Whatever we once shared, it’s in the past. I have no wish to revive –’
‘But you’re the one who came to me. You’re the one who came to my house.’
I draw back for a moment, feeling the colour coming into the skin on my neck. ‘That was a mistake.’
‘You came to me,’ he repeats, louder this time, the insistence in his voice drawing the attention of some of the mums at the next table. His hands are on the table resting on either side of his plate, palms facing up. He scratches at his wrist again, and this time I notice the welts there, raised and reddened. They look like hives.
‘What did you think? That you could just turn up at my home like that and drive away and not expect me to contact you?’ He laughs again, but it dies quickly. ‘How could I not when you were clearly sending me a message?’
‘I wasn’t,’ I countered. ‘I shouldn’t have gone there that day –’
‘So why did you?’
‘I don’t know. Curiosity, I suppose. But also … also to tell you that I want you to stop what you’ve been doing. Stop this harassment.’
‘Harassment?’
‘What else would you call it?’ I respond, trying to keep my voice calm and steady. ‘The newspaper clippings, those awful threats –’
‘What newspaper clippings?’
‘Oh, please, don’t deny it. I know that it was you. It can’t have been anyone else. Although I have to say that I’m shocked at the meanness of the gestures – the bitterness. I didn’t think you’d stoop to something like that. And I’m also pretty sure that sending threatening messages like that is verging on criminal.’
His brow has furrowed, and he’s watching my face avidly.
‘I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. What messages?’
The blank expression on his face goads something in me. I’m tired of this. Tired of the shadow he’s cast over my life in these past few weeks, tired now of his obfuscation.
Leaning closer to him, my voice lowered so that the other diners can’t overhear, I say: ‘Clippings about the ash cloud. About what happened. Ugly messages scrawled across them, an implicit threat.’
‘What threat?’
‘Oh, come on. You know what I mean –’
‘Why did you come back?’
His question catches me off guard.
‘That phone call,’ he goes on, ‘all those years ago, when you told me that you were leaving Ireland. That we would never see each other again. You insisted that you would never come back here. So why did you?’
Flustered, I answer: ‘I was offered a job. And Ed’s father was in poor health –’
‘Ed?’ The name drops from his mouth with disdain.
‘My husband –’
‘Ed what?’
‘Sharpe,’ I admit.
Michael nods at that, like he’s squirrelling the information away in some corner of his brain. I have the uncomfortable feeling that I’ve already told him too much, given him too much detail about my life as it is now, when what I want is to shut him out completely, seal the doors and windows against him.
‘So where are they?’ he asks.
‘What?’
‘These clippings. Show them to me.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘I got rid of them. I threw them away.’
He makes a small huffing sound, and it angers me.
‘What did you think I would do? Hold on to them? They were poisonous!’ It comes to me again – the garish red ink hooping my throat in one picture – and I can almost feel the tightening about my own neck. ‘Look, I don’t have time for this, so you can drop the act. I just want it to stop, okay? All of it – the texts, the phone calls, those fucking notes. You’re to stop. Okay?’
I glance across at the table of mums, and at the elderly couple seated just behind Michael to see if they are looking. When I bring my gaze back to him, his face is blandly mild, the only betrayal of his feelings the flaring of his eyes.
‘You know, Faye,’ he says quietly, ‘you turn up at my house out of the blue after years and years, uninvited. Then you come here today and accuse me of sending you threatening notes and yet you can’t provide a single one. For all I know, they don’t exist. You’ve made them up.’
‘Why would I do such a thing?’
‘As a ruse. To make contact with me again. To meet.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous!’
He shrugs, his smile quietly self-satisfied, almost smug.
‘I know it was you,’ I insist. ‘It has to be. No one else knows.’
‘Are you sure about that?’ he asks.
‘Yes.’
‘You never told anyone? About what happened, what we did?’
‘Of course not!’
‘Not even your husband?’
The question feels pointed, and I lower my eyes, shamed by my own deception. ‘We both promised, remember? That we’d never tell a soul.’
He absorbs that information, looks down at his coffee, something shifty entering his manner.
‘Did you?’ I ask. ‘Tell someone? Your mother or –’
‘Of course not!’
‘Did you tell Min –’
‘Min didn’t send you any threats. She’s old now, bedridden. She can’t even make it to the bathroom without help.’
‘What about your wife?’
His frown of confusion is back. ‘What wife? I don’t have a wife.’
‘Girlfriend. Partner, then.’ Seeing the frown persist, I explain quickly: ‘The woman I saw outside your house. The woman and child. I assumed that they –’
He laughs – a quick blurt of amusement – and shakes his head. ‘Verona? You thought she was my wife?’
‘Why is that funny?’
He bites his lip, brings his laughter under control. ‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘You’re right, it’s not funny. And Verona is a good person. A good friend. It’s just …’
He stops, grows suddenly serious. Leaning in slightly, he pushes his plate aside, his eyes sweeping the surface of the table, and in a low voice says: ‘There’s only ever been you, Faye. Always has been. Always will be.’
The words shock me into silence. The simplicity of the message, the gentle but forthright way he’s stated it.
‘Things have been hard for me, these past few years,’ he says. ‘I just can’t seem to get my act together.’ He laughs briefly, embarrassed more than amused. ‘But whenever things get really bad, do you know what I do?’
I shake my head, uncomfortable as he holds me with his gaze, his face open and guileless, his eyes clear, the vivid blue I so well remember.
‘I turn my mind to an evening in October – years back, but it’s still vivid. There’d been a run of hot days – an Indian summer – and I’d headed out towards Dún Laoghaire for a swim. Afterwards I’d taken my book to the West Pier and was sitting up on the grass reading, when a girl appeared on her bicycle – a girl with long chestnut hair. We hardly knew each other, but I recognized you from class. It was pure serendipity, both of us being there together. I remember everything from that afternoon. The red T-shirt you were wearing with your jeans, the little silver decals on your bike. I even remember the book I was reading – The Corrections – it weighed a tonne. We walked along the pier together, the evening sun throwing orange light on the rocks. And by the time we reached the end of the pier, I knew that I loved you. When things get bad for me, I go back there, to the end of the pier. It holds a special place in my heart. It was the first place we kissed –’
‘Stop it,’ I say, alarmed at how far he has gone into this, how far I have let him go, allowing myself to get pulled into his web of nostalgia, momentarily forgetting how dangerous he is to me.
‘Faye –’
‘Enough!’ I stand up quickly, picking up my phone and dropping it into my bag. I’m reaching for the notebook when his hand shoots out and grabs my arm. His fingers circling my wrist are hot and clammy, his grip tight. My heart is beating faster now. ‘Let go of me,’ I tell him, keeping my voice very calm and very cold.
The mothers at the next table have fallen silent and are openly staring at us.
‘You’re the love of my life,’ he tells me, the statement uttered earnestly, without guile or embarrassment. Part of me knows that I should feel a rising anxiety, that I should be repelled, and I am. But I’m fascinated too. Despite the vague sense of threat, I am held by the strength of his feeling.
‘The love of your life? You don’t even know me.’
‘How can you say that? After everything we’ve been through together?’
‘What is it you want from me? Some sort of closure? Some peace of mind? I don’t know how I can help you. What happened between us happened a long time ago. We’re both different people now.’
‘You really believe that?’
‘I believe it’s best to leave the past in the past. Move on.’
‘All I’ve ever wanted,’ he continues, ‘is to hear the knock on my door, to see your outline behind the glass and to know that finally you had come back to me. That you had realized it too.’
‘Realized what?’ I ask, knowing that it’s foolish to ask the question but I can’t help myself.
‘That we can’t live without each other.’
Enough. I wrench my hand free and lean in quickly, lowering my voice: ‘Whatever it is you think, whatever thoughts are spinning around in your head – it’s a distortion. It’s not real. I’ve moved on with my life – I’m married now – and it’s time you moved on too.’
‘And you love him, do you? You’re happy together? Fulfilled?’ Scorn leaks into his voice, and it’s a relief from the relentless pull of his emotional pleading. Scorn I can handle.
‘My marriage is none of your business. In fact, nothing in my life is any of your concern. I want you to leave me alone, do you understand, Michael? You’re to stay away from me –’
‘Or what? You’ll call the police?’ The corner of his mouth pulls up fractionally – a shadow of a smirk. ‘Aren’t you afraid of what questions they might ask? Who knows what they might find out?’
It’s disconcerting, the way his manner leaps about from adoration to implicit threat.
It’s an effort to keep my voice calm. ‘You can’t threaten me.’
He holds my gaze. ‘Sometimes, in the night, I think I can hear crying –’
‘Right. That’s it.’ I reach again for my notebook, my hand accidentally brushing against the tall glass that holds my barely touched latte. It topples off the saucer, coffee splashing everywhere, and, as I fumble to right the glass, my notebook slips from the table and falls to the ground, a flutter of loose pages landing around it.
‘Shit!’ I put down my bag and bend to the floor.
Michael moves on to one knee, hurriedly retrieving the scraps of paper that have scattered. He hands them to me and I mutter a thanks, then straighten up, fixing the handle of my bag over the crook of my arm. I’ve stayed long enough, and now I just want to get away from him.
I turn back to say my goodbye, but it dies in my throat. His hand is outstretched. Caught between his index and middle fingers is the grainy greyscale image of the curled-up child that I am carrying.
‘You forgot this one,’ he says quietly.
The air in the room seems to inflate and then collapse. I reach and take it from him, stuffing it into my bag, my heart pounding. It’s just a picture. It doesn’t matter, I tell myself, but my inner voice sounds weak and unsure.
‘Goodbye, Michael,’ I say, turning from him quickly, but, as I do, my hip knocks forcefully against the back of a plastic chair, threatening to topple it. He reaches forward quickly, rights the chair, setting it back on its four legs, and as I look back to mutter my thanks I see that he is staring at me. All traces of his earlier affection have gone.
‘Does he know?’ he asks me now. ‘Your husband?’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I answer, flustered.
‘Yes, you do. You know exactly what I mean.’
And what he says next makes my blood run cold.
‘I mean our baby. Have you told him about that? Or have you led him to believe that this baby is your first?’