‘That bar’s fine.’ She pointed to my bar across the street. The thought of going back in there with her was horrible, mixing my thoughts of her with the reality of her, but I sensed the tenuousness of the situation, so I let her lead me across the road. She asked for a vodka and tonic, so I had the same and carried both our drinks to a table in the corner, far away from my usual one in the window.
As we sat I saw she was wearing the eagle round her neck and my heart did another tiny jig. Her hair was loose and her beauty left me slightly light-headed. It made me want to reach out and touch her, made me want to check she was made of the same flesh and blood as the rest of us.
‘So?’ She sounded tired.
‘I just wanted to apologise for that email I sent you when you were on honeymoon.’
‘Which one?’
‘The first one, obviously.’
‘So you don’t think you need to apologise for the second one? The one in which you talked about me leaving Angus?’
‘I know you think you love him.’
She laughed, but the sound was hollow. ‘I know I love him.’
‘I don’t think you do. I think you still love me.’
We looked at each other across the table and I thought that from the outside we must have looked like lovers. We always shared a bubble, V and I, we were always a unit against all those awful people outside our Crave.
‘Mike,’ she said. ‘I love Angus.’
‘I know I hurt you very badly and I will go on saying sorry till the end of time, if that’s what it takes. But you don’t love Angus. You’re using him to get over me.’
I saw her eyes flicker. ‘Are you OK, Mike? I’m worried about you.’
‘If you can’t admit you love me now, will you admit to loving me once?’
She sipped from her drink, leaving an almost invisible layer of lip salve on the rim. I had to stop myself from reaching over and licking the mark. ‘Of course I loved you, you don’t have to ask that.’
‘But love doesn’t stop. You must love me still.’
She kept her eyes down. ‘But love changes, doesn’t it?’
‘I still crave you,’ I tried, because I didn’t know what she meant. Love never changes.
‘Don’t,’ she said, but the word sounded stretched, desperate even. Her chest was moving up and down, up and down.
‘We could try the Kitten Club again. Angus won’t go with you, but I would.’
‘For God’s sake, Mike,’ she said, but her breathing had quickened.
‘What we had doesn’t just vanish. I know you remember what it felt like to be in bed with me.’
‘Stop.’ I knew I had gone too far. The eagle swung annoyed round her neck.
‘Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.’
‘You need to stop this, Mike. For both of us.’
‘Do you ever Crave with Angus?’ I asked, a mist rising through me.
‘For God’s sake. Don’t be ridiculous.’ She stood up but I grabbed at her wrist and she sat down again.
‘Sorry, sorry. I just want you to be happy.’
‘I am happy.’
‘No, I mean properly happy, with me. Not this pretend happy with Angus.’
‘Why do you think it’s pretend?’ she asked and I saw a real question in her eyes.
‘Because you’re not the sort of person to fall in love so quickly, or have that big stupid wedding.’
She drew a pattern in the table with some of the spilt vodka. ‘Maybe you don’t know the person I am. Maybe I didn’t know the person I was until I met Angus. Maybe you don’t know yourself yet.’ I didn’t like those words and they shot through me in a way which made me want to look down and see if I was bleeding. ‘I’m not your mother, Mike. I didn’t abandon you. What we shared was amazing and special, but it’s over now. You have to move on.’
My hand was tight around my glass and I felt my eyes sting with tears. ‘Don’t say that.’
She swallowed hard and the eagle bounced. ‘Look, Angus is going away for a few days, but when he gets back you should come over and we could talk to you together. Maybe then you’ll understand this isn’t some fake marriage.’
‘No thanks.’ I couldn’t think of anything worse than talking to the monkey man Angus.
She sighed and stood up, but more slowly this time. ‘I’m going now.’
I let her walk away while I sat and looked into the vibrating liquid in my glass. I’ve always hated vodka and how it can sneak up on you. How it looks like water but is really very potent. I gulped at it and it shot through my system, waking and charging it.
It was clear that V had constructed an impressive fantasy around Angus to shield her from the pain I had caused her with Carly. She seemed to have even herself fooled and that thought scared me because how do you show someone that what they believe to be true is really not the truth?
I had finished my vodka so I took V’s and downed it. And she must have left part of herself in the glass because as I drank it was like she was opening my eyes and my ears. I realised that I’d been an idiot. Angus is going away for a few days, V had said. And if that wasn’t an invitation to be there when he wasn’t I didn’t know what was.
The next day was Saturday and Elaine rang first thing to say she was coming into London and could she take me up on my offer and pop in for a cup of tea. It was slightly annoying because I had been considering visiting V that day, but Sunday was probably better anyway, so I said yes.
She arrived just after lunch, carrying no visible reason for a trip to London. She walked all round the house, exclaiming at every room. I realised that she was the first person, apart from myself and the builders and decorators, who had ever been upstairs since I’d moved in. It made me wish that I’d made an excuse and pretended to be busy, because surely V should be the first person to see her new home, not her sort of soon-to-be mother-in-law. But Elaine lingered in every room, running her hands over the furniture and opening cupboard doors, turning on light switches, and even once bizarrely running the taps. If she could have waited just a few more weeks, I thought, V and I could have shown her round together, which would have been a far more pleasant experience.
Predictably she wasn’t so keen on the garden, which was still a mess. I could see how much better it was going to look, but Elaine is one of those people who can’t bear to change things for the sake of it, or throw things away. There were always cellophane-wrapped plates in the fridge at her house, unfranked stamps steamed off envelopes in drawers and so-called scrap paper which had to be written or drawn on both sides before she’d buy any more. The motto Waste Not, Want Not was pinned by the clock in the kitchen, which was, I realised, nothing more than an early version of Kaitlyn’s wild horses, a thought both pleasing and disconcerting at the same time.
We sat at the kitchen table to drink our tea, Elaine saying she didn’t want to risk spilling anything in the drawing room. I had bought some fancy cupcakes from the deli and she picked at one, but didn’t seem to enjoy it.
‘So, you’ve really set yourself up here,’ Elaine said, looking round the kitchen.
The house felt vulgar seen through Elaine’s eyes, as I had known it would. You could have probably fitted her kitchen into mine four times over. ‘Yes.’
‘It’s a very large house,’ she said and the words hung in the air. ‘You must be making an awful lot of money.’
‘You know I am.’ I knew my face was red and it felt no different to being a child and having her tell me off for sneaking another biscuit.
‘I don’t think I’ve ever asked you, Mike. Do you enjoy the work?’
Remnants from my conversation with Kaitlyn floated back to me. What she’d said about selling up and moving to the coast had stuck to me like flotsam and I realised as I sat with Elaine that I didn’t particularly enjoy what I did. ‘I don’t know really. I suppose it’s OK.’ But even as I said that I thought of the way I jumbled figures and numbers to make them behave as I wanted them to. How I never actually saw anything I had created, how nothing real ever changed hands, how my whole working life was intangible.
Elaine sipped at her tea, her hands encircling the mug. ‘I suppose there must be a point where you’ve made enough.’
I thought of all the zeros in my bank balance. ‘I suppose.’
She looked me straight in the eye. ‘What would you really like to do, Mike, I mean if you could choose anything?’