‘What’s this got to do with us, Justin?’
He sighs, frustrated. He does this occasionally. As though the weight of his complicated thought process has to be lifted and repositioned once in a while just to make it bearable. ‘Alice, you’re a truly good person, and in many ways we have so much in common – our values, our outlook, the things we like to do . . . When I’m with you, I’m really not bothered about being around anybody else. I don’t really care where we go, or what we do, so long as we do it together.’ He comes and sits on the end of the bed, runs a hand over my cheek and twirls a strand of my hair around his index finger. ‘I feel so at peace with you that way. You make me extremely happy. I look forward to getting to see you every day, and I know that, more than anything, I want to make you happy and do what’s right by you.’ His hand slides to the back of my head, cupping it. I can feel the pleasant press of his warm fingers. ‘So yes, I believe I’m in love with you.’
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the way he looks at me. It’s up there with the way he looked at me in that bar, that first day.
‘So, what about Lisa? Were you in love with her?’ When I see his face, I say, ‘It’s important for me to know. To have a picture.’
I can almost see his brain ticking through the right way to reply. ‘I’m sure I must have thought I was, yes,’ he says, after a short spell. ‘There was a lot to love about her. But when it came down to it, it didn’t go the distance.’
He has said a version of this before: about it not going the distance. But, undoubtedly, it had gone some distance. They had met at Oxford. She was reading Law, too. She even found a job up North to be with him. They had lived together for two years, so I assume he must have been considering marrying her because he’d once said he’d never live with someone if he had no intention of a future. Justin is modern in so many ways, yet very old-fashioned in others.
‘And Jemma?’
‘Jemima!’
I always deliberately misname her.
‘That was just a physical thing. It’s a shame there wasn’t more, but there wasn’t. Not on my part, anyway.’
A physical thing that had gone on a long time. And she was very beautiful – enormously tall, and slim and dark-haired – because we had bumped into her once in Eldon Square. But I don’t really care to think about that.
He looks at me forthrightly. ‘If we can forget about ex-girlfriends . . . I suppose I’m just saying I think there comes a time in life where if everything that you have with someone feels good, feels right, and they are good, good in their heart and soul, and you want the same things, then you have to go with it. You have to decide you’re going to make it work.’
‘So that’s what you’re doing with me? Making it work?’
Way too much honesty! Justin has never disappointed me before. But I am disappointed now.
‘Now you’re going to try to twist it.’
‘No.’
‘You are. You’re trying to hear what you want to have heard. To twist it. Because you’ve got issues with yourself. Maybe with what others have done to you, but you have to get over that.’ He seems genuinely frustrated by me. ‘What I’m saying – even though you’ve read it the wrong way – doesn’t diminish what this is, what we have. We’re not teenagers. I’m just trying to take a mature stance, that’s all.’
‘You could have left it at the bit about So yes, I believe I am in love with you. I’d have been fine with that.’ I try to sound light again. He is right: I do try to find blemishes. Maybe because the quiet voice inside me would think that if my own father didn’t think I was worth sticking around for, then why would any man? But I hate that strain in myself. I hate anyone even knowing it exists.
He draws my face in, until it’s barely an inch from his own. ‘Let me repeat. I want you to know it in no uncertain terms. I am in love with you, Alice.’ He kisses me, slow and long. ‘Are you happy now?’
I’m tired of this conversation. ‘Happy enough.’
FIFTEEN
Evelyn
Holy Island. 1983
‘I’m leaving Laura.’
They were standing in Evelyn’s kitchen. It was almost the end of their week. A week of him working with her on the house as he sang along to the radio, and her smiling inwardly, listening to him; of Evelyn cooking for him, them eating in the garden, and kissing under the plum tree. Of their jaunts to various little villages along the coast, where they would wander in and out of tea rooms, or buy fish and chips in cartons that they would then sit and eat at the end of the pier, feeding the odd seagull with the scraps of batter – careful not to look too cosy in case they were seen and aroused suspicion. But the last few days had been heavily weighted with the threat of it all ending. It had muted all joy and all conversation. Now she could barely meet his eyes without the tears springing.
Evelyn was wearing one of her mother’s dressing gowns. They had made love. He had dressed again in his gardening clothes. He had clung to her like he knew he was going to lose her, and even though she was busying herself by making tea, she was still aware of the bleak absence of his body. The ghostly pencil-line around where his love had just been.
‘Eddy, you can’t possibly leave Laura! This is insane!’ She quickly abandoned the idea of making tea.
He searched her face, slightly stunned by her reaction, but she refused to look at him. ‘Evelyn, I can’t speak for you, or for how you feel, but I, for one, am not going back to the way things were. I’d rather be alone for the rest of my life than plod on with her after this.’
A flurry of panic went through her. At the idea of going back to Mark she felt only the blankness of impossibility. But, strangely, that didn’t mean she wanted to feel this way. She recognised they had crossed a bridge to somewhere that neither of them was truly prepared to find themselves.