7
“I don't really care,” Mark sighs. “I think it's ridiculous, but am I angry about it? No. Do I think it will work? No. Do I think that you might actually be losing your mind?” He glances at Julia and decides to leave that last as a rhetorical question.
Julia sits on the other sofa, sheet still draped around her, the melted candles and herbs now in a pile in the corner of the room, and the coffee table back in place before Mark had the chance to lose it completely.
Bella has slunk off back to her hotel.
“You're the one who keeps saying I needed to do something about it,” Julia pouts.
“Yes. I mean going to see a fertility expert. Not dance half naked because of some ridiculous thing you found on the internet.”
“How do you know it's ridiculous?”
“Julia. It's ridiculous.”
“But Bella knows someone who got pregnant after doing it and she'd had problems for ages.”
Mark snorts in disgust.
“What else am I supposed to do?” Julia pleads. “The only reason I haven't gone to see any fertility experts is because I don't want to upset you.”
“Upset me? Why the f*ck would it upset me?” And slowly it dawns on him. “You really do blame me for this, don't you? You think that I'm the problem. That you would have been pregnant months ago if it weren't for me. Jesus Christ. I don't believe you. What the hell makes you think you're not equally at fault? How do you know the problem isn't yours?”
“Because I've been pregnant,” Julia spits. “That's why. Because when I was twenty-two I had an abortion. That's why. So now you know. I don't need to go to any fertility f*cking experts because there's nothing wrong with me.”
There's a long silence until eventually Mark looks at her with tears in his eyes. “You bitch.” It is almost a whisper.
“Oh God, I'm sorry.” Julia realizes, too late, she has pushed it too far, and she gets up to go to him, to comfort him, misinterpreting his tears for pain at the realization that he is infertile. She reaches out her arms and he pushes her away.
“You f*cking bitch,” he says again. “Now I know why our relationship is so shit. Now I know why we hardly speak anymore, other than to argue. You blame me. You think you're perfect and I'm not and you hate me for it, don't you?”
“No . . . ,” she falters. “I don't, I didn't want you to know, though. I thought maybe in time it would just happen.”
“There's only one thing I do know,” Mark says, picking up his coat. “You've got some bloody nerve accusing me. So you had an abortion over ten years ago. So what? You're just as likely to have the problem yourself.” He puts his coat on as Julia watches him in fear.
“Where are you going?”
“Out.” And he turns round and slams the front door behind him.
Oh shit. Oh shit. What has she done? Julia paces nervously around the living room. She phones Sam, desperate to talk, but the answering machine is on, and there seems to be a fault on the line of the mobile phone Bella's rented while she's here.
She pours herself a glass of wine and is astonished to see her hand is trembling. What has she done? What has she done?
Is it too late?
She didn't mean to say those things. Or maybe she did. As scared as she is that this might be it, that she might have thrown away her man, her security, her life of the past four years, she needed to say those things.
A pressure cooker. That's it. She has been a pressure cooker, slowly building up steam but suppressing it, trying not to rock the boat with the force of her anger, her resentments, and now that she has blown the lid off she is terrified. It also feels pretty good.
Good not to have to hide it anymore. Surely she can repair this? Surely Mark will come back later this evening, still hurt, pride wounded, but she will be able to kiss it all better and restore the equilibrium?
She calls Mark. Repeatedly. His mobile is switched off, and she is too edgy to do anything other than sit next to the phone pressing the redial button. Oh God. What has she done? The more time passes, the worse she feels.
The hours stretch out. Eight o'clock. Nine o'clock. Ten o'clock. At eleven she starts to feel a little easier, because where could he have gone other than the pub, and the pub will be closing, he will be home soon.
At eleven-thirty she bursts into tears, this time, finally, reaching Bella at her hotel.
“Where've you been, for Chrissakes?” she blurts out, voice thick with tears.
“Julia? Is that you? What's happened?”
“I think Mark may have left me,” and vocalizing it makes it a real possibility. A possible reality. Julia bursts into tears.
“I'll come over,” Bella says, but Julia stops her.
“No. No. You don't have to come over.” Bella is secretly relieved, given that she is staying in the Metropolitan and is in no mood to shlep back to Gospel Oak today. Once is quite enough, thank you.
Julia tells Bella what happened after Bella left the house, embarrassed at Mark finding them draped in the sheets and baby-dancing.
“Shit,” Bella says. “Where do you think he is?”
“I don't know,” weeps Julia. “I wish I'd never said anything. I wish this day had never happened.”
“You know what I think you need? You need a holiday.”
“We're planning on going to Majorca this summer. We were. Before he left.” A fresh round of sobs and Bella waits patiently until there is a gap in the hiccups.
“I don't mean you and Mark. I mean you. Why don't you come back to New York with me? The office phoned just before and I'm needed back. Urgently. They've booked me on a flight tomorrow lunchtime. Bet you there are still seats.”
“New York?” Julia's tears are drying up already. “New York?” It's an interesting proposition, and Bella can hear that she is eyeing up the bait. Even though she may not be hungry, she's certainly interested. It's enough of a start.
“You could ring now and book it, and you wouldn't have to spend any money on hotels or anything as you're more than welcome to sleep on my sofa bed, and we'd have the most fantastic time, and God knows you need a holiday and—”
“But what about Mark?”
“What about Mark? You're both unhappy, you've both said terrible things, and the best thing for you both right now is to have some space. Talk to him when he gets home, tell him you're doing this to save your relationship, then come out and have some fun. Jesus, Julia. When was the last time you had any fun?”
“I couldn't. I mean, it sounds great but I couldn't just go. There's too much to do and—”
“What do you have to do?”
Julia sighs. “Okay, it's not that I'm particularly busy, but half my stuff's in the laundry and I haven't got anything to wear and—”
“For God's sake, Julia. New York's the shopping capital of the world. It's cheap and it's easy. Just stick some underwear in a suitcase and come. Anything else you need you can get there.”
“I haven't been to New York for years,” Julia muses.
“Right. Then you're coming. I'm going to put the phone down now and see if I can get my office to organize your flight. I'll call you back.”
Julia is too stunned to do anything, but half an hour later, when Bella calls her back, she goes into overdrive, pushing aside her worries about Mark, and starting to pack.
She's barely thinking, whirling around the huge house, sorting out dark washes from white washes, ironing sweaters, oblivious to the time, to the fact that Mark still isn't home, and, good God, what is that feeling in her stomach?
Not a baby. Not a hope of that when her period has just arrived, but is that . . . could that be . . . butterflies? As she neatly folds sweaters and tucks shoes into her suitcase, Julia is astonished to find she is grinning.
She stops only to put the kettle on and make some coffee, because while her mind is racing, her eyes are starting to close. The coffee manages to do the trick, and finally her suitcase is packed and she collapses on the sofa.
And the key turns in the lock.
Julia turns to look at the clock. It is six-fifteen in the morning. She doesn't say anything as Mark walks into the room, sits on the sofa facing her, unable to meet her eye.
He looks terrible. He looks as though he is either very very drunk, or very very hung over, and Julia assumes he is hung over. His suit is crumpled, tie crooked, and his hair all over the place.
Once upon a time Julia would have demanded to know where he had been, who he had been with, but it has been a long night, and she is too relieved to see him back to put him through an interrogation.
“Are you going?” he whispers finally, and Julia melts, for he has seen the suitcase in the hall and has clearly presumed she is leaving him.
“No,” she says, “not exactly. Although sort of.” Mark looks up, confused. “I'm sorry for what I said earlier. I'm sorry for everything. I know we haven't been happy recently and I know I haven't been fun, and I really do appreciate how hard this has been for you, this bad luck, and not getting pregnant, and getting obsessed.
“But at this moment in time the only thing I'm absolutely sure of is that I need some space, and I imagine, given your disappearance until”—she checks her watch—“a quarter past six in the morning, you do too. I'm not leaving as in leaving you, but I've decided to go to New York with Bella for a break. I need some time on my own, to think about my life, our life together, and I need to try and, I don't know . . . God, it sounds so stupid to say I need to find myself again, but that's how I feel.”
“Are you really that unhappy?” he asks, and Julia thinks for a moment about what to say. She could lie, say that really she was fine, and that it wasn't so bad, and that it was something that would just blow over, but she's fed up with lying.
“Yes,” she says. “And you are too. I'm not sure anymore whether that's because of not having a baby, or because of us. Because of what's happened to the relationship, or because of me, but I do know that neither of us is ever going to find out if I just stay here and we carry on in the same old routine.”
“I take it you're leaving soon?”
Julia nods.
“Why don't I make some coffee?” she says, and he stands up just as she brushes past him on her way to the kitchen, and in that split second they look at one another, and both reach out and put their arms around one another. Mark squeezes Julia, who squeezes him in return, both clinging on as if for dear life, both shocked at this intensity, both trying to suppress the knowledge that hugs like this mean only one thing.
Good-bye.
Mark insists on driving her to Heathrow, and even though she was planning on taking a cab to Bella's hotel and driving up with her, she knows that they are both fragile, and somehow being together, even after the night they have had, even though this isn't a breakup, it's just a holiday, somehow this semblance of normality is comforting.
There isn't much to say on the way to the airport, clearly not helped by the fact that the lack of sleep all night has now rendered Julia almost incoherent with exhaustion.
“I used to do this all the time,” she yawns. “Why do I feel like I've been hit with a sledgehammer now?”
“That's what happens when you reach thirty-three,” Mark says, who doesn't feel quite as bad, but thankfully still hasn't had to explain his absence.
“I remember going clubbing,” Julia reminisces. “We wouldn't leave the house until midnight, and we wouldn't come back home until at least ten the next morning, and more often than not I wouldn't even bother going to bed that day. I used to be fine.”
“And you managed to stay awake all night dancing without the help of any, er, illegal substances?”
“Ah yes.” She smiles at her selective memory. “I suppose that might have helped.”
Mark turns the radio on to fill the silence, as Julia stares out the window and remembers the last time she was in New York. She hasn't thought about this in years, and as the memories drift back she finds herself smiling.
She was twenty-three. God. Almost ten years. Where does it go? Working on a documentary about female private investigators mostly catching out adulterous husbands. She had never been to America before, and Mike sent her out there with another researcher called Caroline.
She'd been to W. H. Smith's weeks before, and the pages of her Rough Guide to New York were already bent and creased long before she even stepped off the airplane at JFK. She'd marked all the places she wanted to go, the bars she wanted to visit, the museums she was desperate to see.
It was late November. As soon as they arrived they were blinded by a hard, bright sun, and whipped in the face by an icy wind. Julia hugged her overcoat around her as Caroline shivered and moaned that Bloomingdale's would be their very first stop for thermal underwear.
Everything seemed so exciting, and they hadn't even left the airport. The cabs really were bright yellow, and the drivers as rude as they always were in the films. The driving was terrible. Mustafa (for that was his name) took great delight in slamming his foot on the accelerator, zooming up to within a foot of the car in front, then slamming on the brake.
Caroline and Julia sat in the back, fighting carsickness, praying the journey would soon be over, both of them far too British and polite to complain.
The skyline swept before them as they crossed the Triborough Bridge, taking their breath away and sending shivers of anticipation down their spines.
Rumbling down Lexington through Harlem, neither girl said a word, noses pressed to the glass as they examined fire escapes, gangs of kids sitting on steps, people everywhere.
“I can't believe we're here,” Caroline said, grinning, looking at Julia for only a split second so as not to miss anything. “I feel like we're going to see Cagney and Lacey any second.”
Down through the nineties, the eighties, continuing downtown and watching the neighborhood change. And then into Gramercy, where they had booked themselves into the Gramercy Park.
“I think I could fall in love in New York.” Caroline flopped back on the bed and sighed dreamily. “I've never seen so many gorgeous men in all my life.”
“Never mind the men. I think I could fall in love with New York. This place is amazing.”
The work was hard. They weren't filming, not yet, just doing the recce and ensuring they had found the right subjects. Most of their days were spent on the phone, or shadowing private investigators to have a real taste of what the job involved.
The first Saturday they walked to Central Park, hired skates, and stumbled their way around Wolman Rink. A carriage ride round the park was a necessity, as was a hot chocolate in the lobby of the Plaza Hotel.
Over the course of the following week they managed the Empire State Building, the Guggenheim, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Statue of Liberty.
Evenings they went downtown. Wandered around SoHo, sitting on benches in Greene Street and Prince Street, people-watching before going into bars and reveling in the warmth, the friendliness of it all.
Or down to the Village, to bohemian coffeehouses where they'd sip cappuccinos late into the night, start talking to neighboring tables, ending up in bars, clubs, with people they'd never met before but who felt like lifelong friends.
They went to the cinema as often as they could, just so they could go back home and nonchalantly claim to have seen everything already. “Oh, The Silence of the Lambs? Haven't you seen it? God, I saw it months ago. You mean it isn't even out for another four months? It's worth the wait. Terrifying.”
They managed to fit in City Slickers, Fried Green Tomatoes, Thelma and Louise, Madonna: Truth or Dare and, obviously, The Silence of the Lambs.
Of course the pair of them had flings. Not sex, not Julia at any rate, the recent HIV and AIDS adverts still positively ringing in her ears, under the misapprehension that she was safe in England and very much in danger in America, but she had delicious snogs with broad-shouldered hunks with thick necks and thicker wallets.
Julia was overwhelmed by Manhattan, and she'd only seen a tiny slice of it. She'd stayed there for two weeks as a tourist, had done all the touristy things, and had had the time of her life. And now she was going back to stay with Bella! In an apartment! On the Upper East Side! Here was her chance to sample New York as a native, and you know what? She couldn't wait.
Why the hell didn't I come back before now? she thought, a wide smile on her face as they pulled into the short-stay car park at Heathrow. Why the hell have I waited so long?