Made in Heaven (12 page)

Gray made a face as if he had been presented with something horrible to eat: a sort of disgusted twist of his mouth. It was gone almost before it appeared and someone less observant than Joss might have missed it. She wondered what it had meant. She said, ‘Don't you approve of the marriage? Adrian seems very pleasant, and he's very successful at his job, isn't he?'

‘I suppose so. I've had a problem with him from when he was a baby. It was natural that he'd be jealous, I suppose. I was a rival for his mother's love. Lydia, I don't want to talk about Adrian. Or Zannah. I want to talk about you. Me too, if you like, but mostly you. Please tell me you don't mean it. About not seeing me.'

‘I do. I don't want to see you again, Gray. Never. I'm … ' Joss felt the blood draining from her face. ‘I'm going to put you and everything we've had together out of my mind. It's going to be difficult, but I am. I'm not going to answer your emails. I'm not going to open any letters. I'm going to throw the phone away. Really.'

‘But why? How can you? How hcan you possibly?'

‘Because now that I know the truth, I can't bear it. You were right. I hate to admit it, but you were. Ever since I realized what you'd done, after I'd got over it a bit: being hurt at the lies you'd been telling, I began to see that maybe you were right. It's been almost unbearable for the last few days, thinking about you and her. I've met her, Gray. I've spoken to her. I can't get some things out of my head, D'you understand?'

Gray didn't say anything for a moment. Then he reached forward and took Joss's hand across the table. ‘Of course I do. It's been hell for more than two years. I calculated that it was worth suffering, just to be in touch with you somehow. Anyhow. I don't care
how
we're connected as long as we are. I can't bear the thought of life without you, Lydia.'

‘Melodramatic, Gray. You're surely not going to throw yourself off the nearest bridge, are you?'

‘No, I wouldn't do that. But my love for you will have nowhere to go and it'll eat me up from inside.'

‘It's the same for me. You haven't got a monopoly on suffering, you know.'

‘You've got your children. Your granddaughter. More grandchildren to come. You'll hardly miss me.'

‘That's not fair, Gray. You know – or maybe you don't – that I will. You've been at the centre of my thoughts, my imagination, my … everything really. Don't you understand?'

‘Then let's go on. Please. Like before. We never hurt anyone, did we? It's been a private thing between us. Why shouldn't we go on?'

Joss lifted her eyes. ‘We can't. I … I had to tell Bob something and I said that it had been one night. I made light of it, Gray. And I had to tell him it was over. I had to, because now … well, we're going to be related. There will be family occasions. The wedding. Birthday parties. Christmases. All sorts of days when we'd have to meet and be friendly. I can't do that. I couldn't survive such things myself and I certainly couldn't look Maureen in the face ever again if I was still seeing you. As things stand, I'm not going to be there on most of those family occasions. I'll make some excuse. There are plenty of families where the two sides never meet. Thousands of them. We hardly ever need to set eyes on one another again after the wedding.'

‘What
about
the wedding though? Zannah wants all the stops pulled out, doesn't she? Everyone'll have to be there for that. We'll have to see one another then.'

‘I'm already dreading the whole thing. I feel faint when I think of it. Isn't that a lovely thing to say about a day that means so much to Zannah? Oh, God, Gray, I hate myself. I hate … all this. I hate the fact that you're going back tonight to your house. Her house. Your house with her. I'd never, never have let it happen if I'd known you were married.'

‘Are you saying you wouldn't have fallen in love with me?'

Joss considered. ‘No, not that. What I mean is, I'd have fallen in love with you and kept quiet about it. I'd never have spent that night with you, and I'd never have written thousands and thousands of words to you. I wouldn't have sat up for hours talking on the phone in the middle of the night. I wouldn't have had the dreams I've been having since I met you. I'd have put you out of my mind and into a box labelled
Married man. Do not touch
and got on with other things.'

Gray smiled. ‘So I was right after all, wasn't I, to lie to you? How do you think I've been feeling, imagining
you with Bob? Not that I knew who he was, of course. You're very good at disguises. Jesus, Lydia, you didn't even tell me your real name but I don't mind. I like having my own name for you. All we have is a whole lot of emails.'

Joss thought of the way she felt when she opened her laptop every night and found his words waiting for her, like flowers growing and blooming, beautiful in the dark. His messages had given her nothing but pleasure, and now she was in danger of losing them.

‘What if we wrote less often?' Gray was saying as she came to herself again.

‘No, it's got to be a clean break. That's what I need, Gray. The only thing that's going to work.'

‘You can do that?'

‘I'm going to try. It'll hurt. I won't deny it. Of course it will. I'm used to you.' Before she could stop them, tears filled her eyes, and she stared down at her hands as she continued. ‘I'm sorry. I promised myself I wouldn't do that. I wasn't going to cry.'

‘Let's get out of here, Lydia, and go for a walk.'

‘I can't. I have to meet my editor soon. I told him I'd be there at … ' She glanced at her watch. There was over an hour till she had to leave, but she didn't know how much longer she could bear to sit in front of Gray and not throw herself into his arms. She lied. ‘At one. I'm sorry. I have to go now. All we're going to do if we sit here is go round and round in circles.'

‘You could tell me what you've been doing.'

‘You know exactly what I've been doing every day, Gray. There's nothing, nothing you don't know about me. Nothing I haven't told you. And I find I don't want to hear about
your
life any longer. D'you see? I don't want to hear what you've been doing with Maureen. I don't want to know what your house is like. I don't want to think of you in bed with her and I can't stop myself. She's beautiful, Gray, and I can't stand it. That's
the truth. I want to go and never never see you again. It's … I can't … '

Joss stood up and grabbed the red bag. She started to walk out of the café and Gray followed her down the wide steps and out of the building. In the forecourt, he caught up with her. ‘Lydia, please. Stop for a moment. Say goodbye at least.'

She paused, and before she knew what was happening, Gray's arms were around her. The tears came then. He held her close to him for a long time. She could feel the material of his jacket under her cheek. Every time she breathed, she could smell his fragrance and it made her want to howl with pain. She pulled herself away and said, tears still pouring down her cheeks, ‘I'm sorry, Gray. I can't do this. You make me weep and then I look a fright. What's Mal going to think?' She could hear her voice wobbling as she tried to strike a more light-hearted note.

‘Let me kiss you,' Gray said, very softly, and turned her face up to his.

Joss let him kiss her, and then her own mouth opened under his and she drank him in. I have to remember this, she was thinking. This is all I'm ever going to have of him. I must keep this for ever. She knew her hands on his back were clawing at him, wanting to pull him so close to her that he became part of her own body. This is what an electric shock is like, she told herself, as she felt herself shaking in his arms. We mustn't, she thought. We can't do this any more. She pulled herself away and said, ‘Goodbye, Gray. I'm leaving.'

She walked away from him with her shoulders thrown back and her head held high. Let him not know how much I hurt, she thought. Let him think I'm okay. By the time she'd walked a few hundred yards up Euston Road, she could no longer see for the tears, which seemed unstoppable. She went into a phone booth, one of the old kind you could step into and be private. She
took a hankie from her bag, blew her nose and wiped her eyes. Then she dialled her editor's number.

‘Mal? I've been delayed, I'm afraid. Can I come in at about four? Thanks.'

She left the phone booth and started to walk without knowing where she was going. Maybe by four o'clock she'd have recovered sufficiently to speak. Maybe the outward signs of her unhappiness would be under control. What would she do now? She felt like an amputee. Looking down, she let one foot follow the other. She stared at the pavement, at her shoes, without seeing anything. The silver mobile phone in her bag was making the noise that indicated a text message had been sent to it. I should have given it back to Gray, she thought. Like a ring. Like a love token. She wondered whether she ought to send it to him, but how could she do that? What if Maureen found it? Could she send it to the hospital? I'll throw it away, she decided. I'll throw it into a drain and it'll go down to the sewers. She scrabbled in her bag and brought it out to the light. I won't read his message, she thought. I won't.

The message said:
Know that I will always love you, Lydia
and she started crying all over again. She stood over a drain and nearly, very nearly, pushed the phone through the grating. I can't, she thought. I can't do it. She put the little silver rectangle back into her bag and went on walking.

Two days after Adrian had asked her to marry him, Zannah bought a notebook in the British Museum shop. Its shiny black cover printed with a pattern of roses and leaves; its very pale pink pages and the matching ribbon to mark a page were irresistible. It became her wedding notebook almost before she'd paid for it. She carried it with her always in a large handbag which fulfilled, according to Emily, much the same function as the shell of a snail: it was Zannah's home, in portable form. It was – Em's words again – beyond tidy. Zannah could always put her hand on anything she needed and there were no disgusting scraps of tissue or biscuit crumbs down there in the silky folds of the lining. Makeup lived in a pretty zip-up bag, made of silvery plastic. Pens and pencils rested in a little case, also silver. The novel she was reading was always in there too, with a proper bookmark to indicate where she'd got to. Cinema tickets, torn envelopes, empty crisp packets were nowhere to be seen. The wedding notebook lay beside whatever she happened to be reading, the two volumes propping one another up and keeping one another's covers unbent. The notebook was a treasure trove of ideas, cuttings neatly stuck in, lists, and doodles of flowers, dresses, decorations and anything else that Zannah felt she had to remember. Em was the only person who understood how she felt about notebooks: how every single one
she'd ever bought made her feel dizzy with possibilities. This one, she'd confessed to her sister, had practically shouted at her from across the shop floor.

When Zannah had first announced her wedding plans to Em, she was taken aback by her sister's reaction. Emily knew her better than almost anyone, and yet even she didn't properly understand. Okay, she agreed that it was up to Zannah to decide what kind of ceremony she wanted, what kind of reception but, in her opinion, the whole thing was a waste of time, money and effort. Zannah found it embarrassing to explain, even to her sister, her reasons for wanting things to be done in this way.

She was behaving superstitiously. This wedding had to be as different as was humanly possible from her wedding with Cal. She wanted, even after several years, no reminders whatsoever of that day, when she'd thought she was embarking on a life of total happiness and love. The reasoning went: if I do everything differently when it comes to the wedding, then the outcome, the marriage, will be different too. She still remembered the immediate aftermath of her separation from Cal and how ill she'd been. That was what it had been: an illness.

On the morning after that night – the night she pushed out of her mind with something like a physical effort whenever it happened to float into it – she'd packed up Isis's things and a few clothes in a kind of daze and fled to her parents' house, like a wounded child. Isis was handed over to Ma and Pa and she lay in bed, weeping, sleeping, weeping again and feeling as though her misery was a stone she'd swallowed and couldn't expel from her body.

Ma used to bring Isis in to see her, and when that happened, Zannah sat up in bed and tried to cuddle her and talk to her, but she was so much like Cal that she always burst into tears again and buried herself in
her pillows. I'm a useless mother too, she told herself. I can't look after my own child. I'm nothing.

Zannah realized now, after a few years had elapsed, that she'd had a breakdown. Not a major collapse, but still something that had taken some time to recover from. Gradually, slowly, she came back to herself. She and Isis stayed with Ma and Pa and Em for six weeks before she had felt strong enough to go back to the flat. Em came with her, which helped. It was lucky that she was about to start her job and needed a place to stay. But even with Em's company, the first few months were hard … harder than anything Zannah had ever done, but she had done it. Until a couple of years ago, she had still cried herself to sleep sometimes, especially after a day when Cal had come round to see Isis. Those were difficult to begin with. He'd occasionally ask her to forgive him and although in those days, when the parting was still raw and sore, she had sort of longed to agree, to get everything back to the way it had been, something inside her recoiled from the still-vivid images of her husband with another woman.