I watched him lightly butter his bread, and found myself inwardly smiling. ‘You paid several.’
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘To go back to what you asked me . . . To be honest, I can’t really say I date all that much. What with the fact that I’m married to my work . . .’ He held up his hands in surrender. ‘As I said, I’ve actually never done anything as crazy as this before, and I honestly never expected you’d say yes. But you did. So that was a lucky strike.’
I found myself being so awake to him, so in tune. He was different. Nice different. I felt oddly at ease with him and trusting of him, which was a novel feeling for me. ‘So you’ll be doing it all the time now? I’ll have started a trend?’ I wasn’t sure how I was going to manage to eat; there were tiny birds’ wings in my stomach.
‘I hope not. That would spoil the coolness of this. Wouldn’t it?’
He ordered us wine once we’d perused the menu, and I liked that he asked if I wanted to choose it, or if he should. Over dinner, our conversation was surprisingly unstoppable: a crash course in what we did for a living, where we had grown up, our friends. We talked about music, TV, royalty, anorexic actresses, his recent trip to Machu Picchu, my desire to go on an African safari if it weren’t for the fact that I was terrified of having to get all those vaccinations. I told him how my job had brought me to Newcastle from Stockport. Justin said he’d grown up in a modest house in Durham, then had gone to read Law at Oxford, but he had left after the first year to travel the world. ‘I just hated the routine and demands of Uni. I realised I’d gone there before I was really ready.’
‘So you walked out of Oxford?’ Was he mad?
‘Well, yes. But I went back.’ After a doubting look, he said, ‘I was always going to go back, Alice.’
The way he casually said my name felt unexpectedly familiar and flattering. He grew on me in leaps and bounds, just with that one tiny little thing.
All was going swimmingly until he asked my age. ‘Why are you asking me that?’ I replied, then joked about how you never ask a lady her age.
He looked slightly wrong-footed for a moment. ‘I don’t know why I asked,’ he said. ‘I didn’t realise it was such a bad question.’
I hated that I’d been touchy. ‘It’s not. I’m thirty-four.’
‘Well,’ he said, appearing genuinely surprised. ‘I’d have guessed no more than late twenties . . . And you want to have kids, I assume?’
The waitress was fussing around us, and I was certain she heard that, so I held back until she left. ‘Yes. I think I do. What about you?’
‘Of course. I think my life will be in danger of becoming a bit self-centred if I don’t. Not that it would be necessarily any bad thing to just have to please yourself until the end of your days. But I think a child would add a lot. I’d like to have something of myself passed on . . . The good parts, anyway. I think I have a lot to teach a child. I mean, I like to believe that.’
He was disarmingly frank. I wondered if he was disappointed that I was a little bit older, then I berated myself for my insecure thinking.
Over dessert and Armagnac, I learnt that his father had died when Justin was only eleven. He was a doctor. ‘My mother was lost without him, and seemed to remarry at breakneck speed. Charlie, my stepfather, was a bastard. He wanted my mother, of course, but I was in the way. He always seemed to have it in for me. Never cheered for my successes. Always seeming to be looking for me to fail . . .’ He went off, seeing distant memories in close-up. I wondered if he always talked so intimately to people he didn’t really know. ‘He was a belittling, criticising prick, to be honest.’ He must have recognised that he was turning the conversation dark. He launched a smile. ‘Other than that, he was fabulous.’
‘That must have been rough, losing your dad so young.’
‘For a boy of that age, it’s probably the most defining thing that can happen to him. I never quite got over it.’
His words, his face, when he spoke of his father, touched me.
‘I had a great stepdad,’ I told him. ‘I was lucky, I suppose. I was only about seven when he came into my life. He was a decade older than my mum. He’d really wanted a family, my mother said, but it hadn’t happened for him. So he took to me wholeheartedly. I couldn’t have asked for more.’
Justin listened intently. ‘What about your real father?’
‘Oh . . . I don’t know all that much.’ This topic hadn’t come up in a long time. ‘He wasn’t a good person. He left us when I was little. I don’t think my mother ever forgave him.’
‘But she had a happy life with your stepfather? Was she in love with him?’
I thought about this. ‘Hmm . . . How do I know if she was or she wasn’t? I think she loved him in a quiet way – if that makes sense. I think she’d loved my real father in a more heartbreaking way. At least, I’m guessing.’
‘Did you never want to ask him to find out?’
I frowned. ‘My real father?’
‘Yes. Didn’t you want to know more about him?’
It took me a moment to reply. ‘Gosh, I don’t know! There was a time when, yes, I was curious. When I was younger. But my mother couldn’t bear him mentioned . . . He had a lot of women. You know . . . affairs. I think he was a bit of a drinker, too . . . Besides, once you get a bit older, you see things more objectively. He abandoned us when I was little. He never once tried to see me. So I don’t know why I would miss someone like that, or why I would want to try to find him.’
I didn’t say how angry I’d been at my mother for keeping so much back. How the questions had been undercut the moment I had brought them up. How, eventually, it was easier to just stop asking them.