‘Hey, you talk about house prices too!’
‘I know! And I fucking bore myself too!’ His shout echoed as he flung yesterday’s clothes against the wall, and then they both stood there in the gloomy bedroom, the blinds still down, the stale bed unmade.
‘Do I bore you then?’ she said quietly.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! That’s not what I said.’ Suddenly exhausted, he sat on the bed.
‘But do I?’
‘No, you don’t. Let’s change the subject, can we?’
‘So, what do you want to talk about?’ she said.
He sat hunched on the edge of the mattress, pressed his hands to his face and exhaled through his fingers. ‘We’ve only been trying for eighteen months, Em.’
‘Two years.’
‘Two years then. I don’t know, I just hate that . . . look you give me.’
‘What look?’
‘When it doesn’t work, like it’s my fault.’
‘I don’t!’
‘That’s what it feels like.’
‘I’m sorry. I apologise. I’m just . . . disappointed. I really want it, that’s all.’
‘So do I!’
‘Do you?’
He looked hurt. ‘Of course I do!’
‘Because you didn’t to begin with.’
‘Well I do now. I love you. You know that.’
She crossed the room and joined him, and they sat for a moment holding hands, shoulders hunched.
‘Come here,’ she said, falling backwards onto the bed, and he followed, their legs dangling over the edge. A shaft of murky light leaked between the blinds.
‘I’m sorry for taking it out on you,’ she said.
‘I’m sorry for . . . I don’t know.’
She lifted his hand and pressed the back of it against her lips. ‘You know. I think we should get checked out. Go to a fertility clinic or something. Both of us.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with us.’
‘I know, and that’s what we’re going to confirm.’
‘Two years isn’t that long. Why not wait another six months?’
‘I just don’t feel like I’ve got another six months in me, that’s all.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘I’ll be thirty-nine next April, Dex.’
‘I’m forty in two weeks!’
‘Exactly.’
He exhaled slowly, visions of test tubes floating before his eyes. Depressing cubicles, nurses snapping on rubber gloves. Magazines. ‘Alright then. We’ll have some tests.’ He turned to look at her. ‘But what’ll we do about the waiting list?’
She sighed. ‘I suppose we might have to, I don’t know. Go private.’
After a while, he spoke. ‘My God. Now that’s something I never thought you’d say.’
‘No, me neither,’ she said. ‘Me neither.
With some sort of fragile peace in place, he got ready for work. The absurd row would make him late, but at least the Belleville Café was running fairly smoothly now. He had employed a sharp, reliable manager, Maddy, with whom he enjoyed good business relations and some mild flirtation, and he no longer had to open up in the mornings. Emma accompanied him downstairs and they walked out into the day, gloomy and nondescript.
‘So where is this house then?’
‘Kilburn. I’ll send you the address. It looks nice. In the photos.’
‘They all look nice in the photos,’ she mumbled, hearing her own voice, sulky and dreary. Dexter chose not to speak, and a moment passed before she felt able to loop her arms around his waist and hold onto him. ‘We’re not being very good today, are we? Or I’m not. Sorry.’
‘That’s okay. We’ll stay in tonight, you and me. I’ll cook you dinner, or we’ll go out somewhere. To the cinema or something.’ He pressed his face to the top of the head. ‘I love you and we’ll sort this out, alright?’
Emma stood silent on the doorstep. The proper thing to do would be to tell him that she loved him too, but she still wanted to mope a little more. She resolved to sulk until lunch time, then make it up to him tonight. Perhaps if the weather cleared up, they could go and sit on Primrose Hill like they used to. The important thing is that he will be there and it will be okay.
‘You should go,’ she mumbled into his shoulder. ‘You’ll be late for Maddy.’
‘Don’t start.’
She grinned and looked up at him. ‘I’ll cheer up by tonight.’
‘We’ll do something fun.’
‘Fun.’
‘We still have fun, don’t we?’
‘Of course we do,’ she said, and kissed him goodbye.
And they did have fun, though it was of a different kind now. All that yearning and anguish and passion had been replaced by a steady pulse of pleasure and satisfaction and occasional irritation, and this seemed to be a happy exchange; if there had been moments in her life when she had been more elated, there had never been a time when things had been more constant.
Sometimes, she thought, she missed the intensity, not just of their romance, but of the early days of their friendship. She remembered writing ten-page letters late into the night; insane, passionate things full of dopey sentiment and barely hidden meanings, exclamation marks and underlining. For a while she had written daily postcards too, on top of the hour-long phone-calls just before bed. That time in the flat in Dalston when they had stayed up talking and listening to records, only stopping when the sun began to rise, or at his parents’ house, swimming in the river on New Year’s Day, or that afternoon drinking absinthe in the secret bar in Chinatown; all of these moments and more were recorded and stored in notebooks and letters and wads of photographs, endless photographs. There was a time, it must have been in the early nineties, when they were barely able to pass a photo-booth without cramming inside it, because they had yet to take each other’s permanent presence for granted.
But to just look at someone, to just sit and look and talk and then realise that it’s morning? Who had the time or inclination or energy these days to stay up talking all night? What would you talk about? Property prices? She used to long for those midnight phone-calls; these days if a phone rang late at night it was because there had been an accident, and did they really need more photographs when they knew each other’s faces so well, when they had shoeboxes full of that stuff, an archive of nearly twenty years? Who writes long letters in this day and age, and what is there to care so much about?
She sometimes wondered what her twenty-two-year-old self would think of today’s Emma Mayhew. Would she consider her self-centred? Compromised? A bourgeois sell-out, with her appetite for home ownership and foreign travel, clothes from Paris and expensive haircuts? Would she find her conventional, with her new surname and hopes for a family life? Maybe, but then the twenty-two-year-old Emma Morley wasn’t such a paragon either: pretentious, petulant, lazy, speechifying, judgemental. Self-pitying, self-righteous, self-important, all the selfs except self-confident, the quality that she had always needed the most.
No, this, she felt, was real life and if she wasn’t as curious or passionate as she once had been, that was only to be expected. It would be inappropriate, undignified, at thirty-eight, to conduct friendships or love affairs with the ardour and intensity of a twenty-two-year-old. Falling in love like that? Writing poetry, crying at pop songs? Dragging people into photo-booths, taking a whole day to make a compilation tape, asking people if they wanted to share your bed, just for company? If you quoted Bob Dylan or T.S. Eliot or, God forbid, Brecht at someone these days they would smile politely and step quietly backwards, and who would blame them? Ridiculous, at thirty-eight, to expect a song or book or film to change your life. No, everything had evened out and settled down and life was lived against a general background hum of comfort, satisfaction and familiarity. There would be no more of those nerve-jangling highs and lows. The friends they had now would be the friends they had in five, ten, twenty years’ time. They expected to get neither dramatically richer nor poorer; they expected to stay healthy for a little while yet. Caught in the middle; middle class, middle-aged; happy in that they were not over happy.
Finally, she loved someone and felt fairly confident that she was loved in return. If someone asked Emma, as they sometimes did at parties, how she and her husband had met, she told them:
‘We grew up together.’
So they went to work as usual. Emma sat at her computer by the window overlooking the tree-lined street, writing the fifth and final ‘Julie Criscoll’ novel, in which her fictional heroine, ironically enough, became pregnant and had to decide between motherhood and university. It wasn’t going very well; the tone was too sombre and introspective, the jokes wouldn’t flow. She was keen to get it finished, and yet uncertain what to do next, or what she was capable of doing; a book for grown-ups perhaps, something serious and properly researched about the Spanish Civil War, or the near-future, something vaguely Margaret Atwoody, something her younger self might respect and admire. That was the idea anyway. In the meantime, she tidied the flat, made tea, paid some bills, did a coloured wash, put CDs back in their cases, made more tea then finally turned on her computer and stared it into submission.
At the café, Dexter flirted a little with Maddy, then sat in the tiny stock room that smelt oppressively of cheese and attempted to complete the quarterly VAT return. But the gloom and guilt of this morning’s outburst still clung to him, and when he could no longer concentrate he reached for his phone. It used to be Emma who made the conciliatory calls and smoothed things over, but in the eight months since their marriage they seemed to have changed places, and he now found himself incapable of doing anything while he knew she was unhappy. He dialled, imagining her at her desk, looking at her mobile phone, seeing his name appear and turning it off. He preferred it that way – much easier to be sentimental when no-one was going to answer back.
‘So I’m here, doing my VAT, and I keep thinking about you and I just wanted to say don’t worry. I’ve arranged for us to view this house at five o’clock. I’ll text you the address, so, who knows. We’ll see. Period property, good-sized rooms. It’s got a breakfast bar apparently. I know you’ve always dreamt of one. That’s all. Except to say I love you and don’t worry. Whatever it is you’re worrying about, don’t. That’s everything. See you there at five. Love you. Bye.’
As routine demanded, Emma worked until two, ate lunch, then went swimming. In July she sometimes liked to go to the ladies pool on Hampstead Heath, but the day had become precariously dark and overcast, and instead she braved the teenage kids at the indoor pool. For twenty minutes she weaved unhappily between them as they dive-bombed and ducked and flirted with each other, manic with the freedom of the end of term. Afterwards she sat in the changing rooms, listened to Dexter’s message and smiled. She memorised the address of the property and called back.
‘Hi there. It’s me. Just to say, I’m setting out now and I can’t wait to see the breakfast bar. I might be five minutes late. Also thank you for your message and I wanted to say . . . I’m sorry for being so snappy today, and for that stupid argument. Nothing to do with you. Just a bit nuts at the moment. The important thing is I love you very much. So. There you go. Lucky you! I think that’s everything. Bye my love. Bye.’
Outside the sports centre the clouds had darkened and finally burst, letting loose fat grey drops of warm rain. She cursed the weather and the wet seat of her bicycle and set off across North London towards Kilburn, improvising a route through a maze of residential streets towards Lexington Road.
The rain became heavier, oily drops of brown city water, and Emma rode standing on the pedals with her head lowered so that she was only vaguely aware of a blur of movement in the side road to her left. The sensation is less of flying through the air, more of being picked up and hurled, and when she comes to rest on the roadside verge with her face against the wet pavement, her first instinct is to look for her bicycle, which has somehow disappeared from beneath her. She tries to move her head, but is unable to do so. She wants to take off her helmet, because people are looking at her now, faces craning over her and she looks ridiculous in a bicycle helmet, but the people crouching over her seem fearful and are asking her over and over again are you alright are you alright. One of them is crying and she realises for the first time that she is not alright. She blinks against the rain falling on her face. She is definitely going to be late now. Dexter will be waiting.
She thinks very distinctly of two things.
The first is a photograph of herself at nine years old in a red swimsuit on a beach, she can’t remember where, Filey or Scarborough perhaps. She is with her mother and father who are swinging her towards the camera, their sunburnt faces buckled with laughter. Then she thinks of Dexter, sheltering from the rain on the steps of the new house, looking at his watch, impatient; he’ll wonder where I am, she thinks. He’ll worry.
Then Emma Mayhew dies, and everything that she thought or felt vanishes and is gone forever.