‘How did you get that scar?’ I pointed to his top lip.
He suddenly looked besieged by me, as though he’d bestowed much greater significance on the question than I had intended. He touched his lip. ‘I fell on some glass when I was a little boy.’
‘Aw! I suppose your dad must have made you all better, though?’
‘He did, actually.’ He looked wistful suddenly. ‘I remember him telling me it was okay to cry, because I had a thing about not crying back then, apparently. And that was all it took. As soon as he said that, I bawled my eyes out, because deep down it hurt like hell.’ He smiled deeply into my eyes. Words petered away, and we were held there in the suspenseful, wondrous liveliness of our chemistry, of what would happen next.
After a moment or two, he said, ‘Alice, I feel like I should be coming on to you in a seriously big way . . . I’m running a bit fast and loose with you.’
‘But you’re just not that into me?’
‘No, I am definitely that into you. But my instincts are telling me to slow down or I’ll spoil it.’ He kissed my cheek again, fractionally closer to my lips this time, then when I opened my mouth to speak – to tell him those had been my thoughts exactly – he popped a kiss there. It was neither brief nor prolonged. But I would think about it so many times after, relive the loose and lovely choreography of it.
‘So even though I might kick myself later,’ he said, ‘I think I’m just going to follow my instincts.’
He tucked a strand of hair behind my ear, and I was aware of everything, every last detail, as all this played out – a heightening of my senses. ‘Goodnight, Alice,’ he said. ‘And if you can stand having me do it, I’ll ring you some time tomorrow when I’m at work and we’ll formulate our next plan of attack.’
‘Don’t say it if you don’t mean it.’ I was only half teasing.
‘I never say anything I don’t mean,’ he said.
ELEVEN
His face takes up half of my computer monitor. His mugshot from the ‘Partners’ page of his law firm’s website. His eyes are locked into mine. I can’t stop staring at them. The real Justin is nothing like this photo, which has an imperturbable, even slightly slick, quality to it – something about his smile. I told him to change the picture. Of course, he completely disagreed, and said he had bigger things than that to worry about.
The gallery was quiet today. I click off the Internet and delete my history – evidence of my pathological time-wasting. I have visited this page too often today. I am addicted to his face. Because it’s after 5 p.m., I’m able to wander guilt-free into the Hopper/Wyeth room to visit my solitary soulmates.
I am scarcely in there ten minutes when I hear my name. When I swing around, Evelyn is walking toward me, all smiles.
‘Maybe I need to find you a job here!’ I greet her with a kiss, which feels surprisingly natural to me.
‘I take the bus into town three times a week. I volunteer at the charity shop on Monday afternoons. There’s only so much looking in shops that a person can do. So I’m taking the opportunity to come and see Christina while she’s still here.’ She sits on the bench beside me, opposite Christina.
‘How are the fellows?’ I ask. She’s impeccably dressed in a lemon, knee-length coat – the kind a young Newcastle reveller with an evolved sense of style would wear, rather than the Queen.
‘No worse, I suppose.’ She sounds defeated, and I am already able to recognise that this is a little unusual for Evelyn.
‘How’s Eddy? Do you think he remembers his visit here and how he spoke about Christina and her house?’
She shrugs her tiny, square shoulders. ‘I’d like to think it means progress. Or, at the very least, that he takes something comforting away from it. Something that lives in him longer than we might believe.’
‘You want it to be more than just a moment.’
Sometimes, the way she looks at me, I think I’ve said the wrong thing.
‘You shouldn’t minimise moments, Alice. Our whole life is made up of them. It shouldn’t always be the big, dramatic events that make you sit up and take notice. The value of your life is in all the unexceptional details.’ She looks at the painting of Christina staring longingly at her home. ‘Christina knows that.’
I find it fascinating how she talks about Christina as though she were real. But then again, Christina had lived. She had been an ordinary person whose conflict – perhaps prosaic at that – just happened to be captured here in oil paint for eternity.
‘The object of her heartbreak,’ Evelyn says.
I stare at the one clump of mascara that’s gluing up some of her eyelashes. ‘You mean Christina’s house? I’ve never imagined a house could break someone’s heart. It’s usually a man, isn’t it?’
I am back in the heat of Evelyn’s scrutiny again. I wonder if she always looks at people too deeply and for too long.
Then she glances down at my wedding ring hand, at the simple platinum band. ‘I hope you have a good man in your life. I hope you got it right the first time. Because we all want that, don’t we? Time advances, we have opportunities for better education, better jobs, a greater say in national politics, yet the love of the right man is still the thing we want more than anything else, even though we’re supposed to be more self-sufficient than that.’ Her eyes move swiftly back to the painting, as though she had never made that brief foray into personal territory.
‘And if I haven’t got it right the first time?’ The image of Justin’s smile on that website blazes in my mind again.
‘You’ll survive,’ she says. ‘We all do. Though it often doesn’t feel like a very nice way to be living. We only realise that surviving is an achievement once we’re old. When we’re young, we feel we were meant for more obvious triumphs.’