Part Four
2002–2005
Late Thirties
‘They spoke very little of their mutual feelings: pretty phrases and warm attentions being probably unnecessary between such tried friends.’
Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Monday Morning
MONDAY 15 JULY 2002
Belsize Park
The radio alarm sounds as usual at 07.05. It is already bright and clear outside, but neither of them move just yet. Instead they lie with his arm around her waist, their legs tangled at the ankle, in Dexter’s double bed in Belsize Park in what was once, many years ago now, a bachelor flat.
He has been awake for some time, rehearsing in his head a tone of voice and phrasing that is both casual and significant, and when he feels her stir he speaks. ‘Can I say something?’ he says into the back of her neck, his eyes still closed, mouth gummed with sleep.
‘Go on,’ she says, a little wary.
‘I think it’s crazy, you having your own flat.’
With her back to him, she smiles. ‘O-kay.’
‘I mean you’re here most nights anyway.’
She opens her eyes. ‘I needn’t be.’
‘No, I want you to be.’
She turns in the bed to face him, and sees his eyes are still closed. ‘Dex, are you? . . .’
‘What?’
‘Are you asking me to be your flatmate?’
He smiles and without opening his eyes, he takes her hand beneath the sheet and squeezes it. ‘Emma, will you be my flatmate?’
‘Finally!’ she mumbles. ‘Dex, it’s all that I’ve lived for.’
‘So, what, yes?’
‘Let me think about it.’
‘Well let me know, won’t you? Because if you’re not interested, I might get someone else in.’
‘I said, I’ll think about it.’
He opens his eyes. He had expected a yes. ‘What’s there to think about?’
‘Just, I don’t know. Living together.’
‘We lived together in Paris.’
‘I know, but that was Paris.’
‘We more or less live together now.’
‘I know, I just—’
‘And it’s insane for you to rent, renting is money down the drain, in the current property market.’
‘You sound like my independent financial adviser. It’s very romantic.’ She pouts her lips and kisses him, a cautious morning kiss. ‘This isn’t just about sound financial planning, is it?’
‘Mainly, but I also think it’d be . . . nice.’
‘Nice.’
‘You living here.’
‘And what about Jasmine?’
‘She’ll get used to it. Besides, she’s only two and a half, it’s not up to her, is it? Or her mother.’
‘And might it not get a bit . . . ?’
‘What?’
‘Cramped. The three of us at weekends.’
‘We’ll manage.’
‘Where will I work?’
‘You can work here while I’m out.’
‘And where will you take your lovers?’
He sighs, a little bored of the joke after a year of almost maniacal fidelity. ‘We’ll go to hotels in the afternoon.’
They lapse into silence again as the radio burbles on and Emma closes her eyes once more and tries to imagine herself unpacking cardboard boxes, finding space for her clothes, her books. In truth, she prefers the atmosphere of her current flat, a pleasant, vaguely Bohemian attic off the Hornsey Road. Belsize Park is just too neat and chi-chi, and despite her best efforts and the gradual colonisation of her books and clothes, Dexter’s flat still retains an atmosphere of the bachelor years: the games console, the immense television, the ostentatious bed. ‘I keep expecting to open a cupboard and be buried under, I don’t know . . . a cascade of panties or something.’ But he has made the offer, and she feels as if she should offer something in return.
‘Maybe we should think of buying somewhere together,’ she says. ‘Somewhere bigger.’ Once again, they have grazed against the great unspoken subject. A long silence follows, and she wonders if he has fallen asleep again, until he says:
‘Okay. Let’s talk about it tonight.’
And so another weekday begins, like the one before and the ones to come. They get up and get dressed, Emma drawing on the limited store of clothes she keeps jammed into her allocated cupboard. He has the first shower, she has the second, during which time he walks to the shop and buys the newspaper and milk if necessary. He reads the sports pages, she the news and then after breakfast, eaten for the most part in comfortable silence, she takes her bike from the hallway and pushes it with him towards the tube. Each day they kiss each other goodbye at approximately eight twenty-five.
‘Sylvie’s dropping Jasmine off at four o’clock,’ he says. ‘I’ll be back at six. You’re sure you don’t mind being there?’
‘Course not.’
‘And you’ll be okay with Jasmine?’
‘Fine. We’ll go to the zoo or something.’
Then they kiss again, and she goes to work, and he goes to work, and so the days go by, faster than ever.
Work. He is working again in his own business, though ‘business’ feels a little too high-powered a word at present for this little delicatessen-café on a residential street between Highgate and Archway.
The idea was hatched in Paris, during that long strange summer in which they had dismantled his life, then put it back together again. It had been Emma’s idea, sitting outside a café near the Parc des Buttes Chaumont in the north-east. ‘You like food,’ she had said, ‘you know about wine. You could sell really good coffee by the pound, imported cheeses, all that swanky stuff that people want these days. Not pretentious or chi-chi, just this really nice little shop, with tables outside in the summer.’ Initially he had bridled at the word ‘shop’, not quite able to see himself as a ‘shopkeeper’ or, even worse, a grocer. But an ‘imported food specialist’ had a ring to it. Better to think of it as a café/restaurant that also sold food. He would be an entrepreneur.