Me Before You (13 page)

When we started going out, Patrick had been working in sales and his favourite things could have been listed as beer, garage chocolate, talking about sport and sex (doing, not talking about), in that order. A good night out for us would probably comprise all four. He was ordinary-looking rather than handsome, and his bum was podgier than mine, but I liked it. I liked the solidity of him, the way he felt when I wrapped myself around him. His dad was dead and I liked the way he acted towards his mother; protective and solicitous. And his four brothers and sisters were like the Waltons. They actually seemed to like each other. The first time we went out on a date, a little voice in my head said:
This man will never hurt you
, and nothing he had done in the seven years since had led me to doubt it.

And then he turned into Marathon Man.

Patrick’s stomach no longer gave when I nestled into him; it was a hard, unforgiving thing, like a sideboard, and he was prone to pulling up his shirt and hitting it with things, to prove quite how hard it was. His face was planed, and weathered from his time spent constantly outdoors. His thighs were solid muscle. That would have been quite sexy in itself, had he actually wanted to have sex. But we were down to about twice a month, and I wasn’t the kind to ask.

It was as if the fitter he got, the more obsessed by his own shape he became, the less interested he was in mine. I asked him a couple of times if he didn’t fancy me any more, but he seemed pretty definite. ‘You’re gorgeous,’ he would say. ‘I’m just shattered. Anyway, I don’t want you to lose weight. The girls at the club – you couldn’t make one
decent boob out of all of theirs put together.’ I wanted to ask how exactly he had come to work out this complex equation, but it was basically a nice thing to say so I let it go.

I wanted to be interested in what he did, I really did. I went to the triathlon club nights, I tried to chat to the other girls. But I soon realized I was an anomaly – there were no girlfriends like me – everyone else in the club was single, or involved with someone equally physically impressive. The couples pushed each other on workouts, planned weekends in spandex shorts and carried pictures of each other in their wallets completing triathlons hand in hand, or smugly comparing joint medals. It was unspeakable.

‘I don’t know what you’re complaining about,’ my sister said when I told her. ‘I’ve had sex once since I had Thomas.’

‘What? Who with?’

‘Oh, some bloke who came in for a Vibrant Hand-Tied,’ she said. ‘I just wanted to make sure I still could.’

And then, when my jaw dropped, ‘Oh, don’t look like that. It wasn’t during working hours. And they were funeral flowers. If they had been wife flowers, of course I wouldn’t have touched him with a gladioli.’

It’s not that I was some kind of sex maniac – we’d been together a long time, after all. It’s just that some perverse bit of me had begun to question my own attractiveness.

Patrick had never minded the fact that I dressed ‘inventively’, as he put it. But what if he hadn’t been entirely truthful? Patrick’s job, his whole social life now revolved around the control of flesh – taming it, reducing it, honing it. What if, faced with those tight little tracksuited
bottoms, my own suddenly seemed wanting? What if my curves, which I had always thought of as pleasantly voluptuous, now seemed doughy to his exacting eyes?

These were the thoughts that were still humming messily around my head as Mrs Traynor came in and pretty much ordered Will and me to go outside. ‘I’ve asked the cleaners to come and do a special spring clean, so I thought perhaps you could enjoy the nice weather while they’re all in there.’

Will’s eyes met mine with the faintest lift of his eyebrows. ‘It’s not really a request, is it, Mother?’

‘I just think it would be good if you took some air,’ she said. ‘The ramp is in place. Perhaps, Louisa, you might take some tea out there with you?’

It wasn’t an entirely unreasonable suggestion. The garden was beautiful. It was as if with the slight lifting of temperatures everything had suddenly decided to look a little bit greener. Daffodils had emerged as if from nowhere, their yellowing bulbs hinting at the flowers to come. Buds burst from brown branches, perennials forcing their way tentatively through the dark, claggy soil. I opened the doors and we went outside, Will keeping his chair on the York stone path. He gestured towards a cast-iron bench with a cushion on it, and I sat there for some time, our faces lifted to the weak sunshine, listening to the sparrows squabbling in the hedgerow.

‘What’s up with you?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re quiet.’

‘You said you wanted me to be quiet.’

‘Not this quiet. It alarms me.’

‘I’m all right,’ I said. And then, ‘It’s just boyfriend stuff, if you really want to know.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Running Man.’

I opened my eyes, just to see if he was mocking me.

‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Come on, tell Uncle Will.’

‘No.’

‘My mother is going to have the cleaners running around like lunatics in there for at least another hour. You’re going to have to talk about something.’

I pushed myself upright, and turned to face him. His house chair had a control button that elevated his seat so that he could address people at head height. He didn’t often use it, as it frequently made him dizzy, but it was working now. I actually had to look up at him.

I pulled my coat around me, and squinted at him. ‘Go on, then, what do you want to know?’

‘How long have you two been together?’ he said.

‘Bit over six years.’

He looked surprised. ‘That’s a long time.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Well.’

I leant over and adjusted a rug across him. It was deceptive, the sunshine – it promised more than it could actually deliver. I thought of Patrick, up at 6.30 sharp this morning to go for his morning run. Perhaps I should take up running, so that we would become one of those Lycra-clad couples. Perhaps I should buy frilly underwear and look up sex tips online. I knew I would do neither.

‘What does he do?’

‘He’s a personal trainer.’

‘Hence the running.’

‘Hence the running.’

‘What’s he like? In three words, if it makes you uncomfortable.’

I thought about it. ‘Positive. Loyal. Obsessed with body fat ratios.’

‘That’s seven words.’

‘Then you got four for free. So what was she like?’

‘Who?’

‘Alicia?’ I looked at him like he had looked at me, directly. He took a deep breath and gazed upwards to a large plane tree. His hair fell down into his eyes and I fought the urge to push it to one side for him.

‘Gorgeous. Sexy. High maintenance. Surprisingly insecure.’

‘What does she have to be insecure about?’ The words left my mouth before I could help myself.

He looked almost amused. ‘You’d be surprised,’ he said. ‘Girls like Lissa trade on their looks for so long they don’t think they have anything else. Actually, I’m being unfair. She’s good with stuff. Things – clothes, interiors. She can make things look beautiful.’

I fought the urge to say anyone could make things look beautiful if they had a wallet as deep as a diamond mine.

‘She could move a few things around in a room, and it would look completely different. I never could work out how she did it.’ He nodded towards the house. ‘She did this annexe, when I first moved in.’

I found myself reviewing the perfectly designed living room. I realized my admiration of it was suddenly slightly less uncomplicated than it had been.

‘How long were you with her?’

‘Eight, nine months.’

‘Not that long.’

‘Long for me.’

‘How did you meet?’

‘Dinner party. A really awful dinner party. You?’

‘Hairdresser’s. I was one. He was my client.’

‘Hah. You were his something extra for the weekend.’

I must have looked blank because he shook his head and said softly, ‘Never mind.’

Inside, we could hear the dull drone of the vacuum cleaner. There were four women in the cleaning company, all wearing matching housecoats. I had wondered what they would find to do for two hours in the little annexe.

‘Do you miss her?’

I could hear them talking amongst themselves. Someone had opened a window, and occasional bursts of laughter filtered out into the thin air.

Will seemed to be watching something in the far-off distance. ‘I used to.’ He turned to me, his voice matter-of-fact. ‘But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve decided that she and Rupert are a good match.’

I nodded. ‘They’ll have a ridiculous wedding, pop out an ankle biter or two, as you put it, buy a place in the country, and he’ll be shagging his secretary within five years,’ I said.

‘You’re probably right.’

I was warming to my theme now. ‘And she will be a little bit cross with him all the time without really knowing why and bitch about him at really awful dinner parties to the embarrassment of their friends, and he won’t want to leave because he’ll be scared of all the alimony.’

Will turned to look at me.

‘And they will have sex once every six weeks and he will adore his children while doing bugger all to actually help look after them. And she will have perfect hair but get this kind of pinched face –’ I narrowed my mouth ‘– through never saying what she actually means, and start an insane Pilates habit or maybe buy a dog or a horse and develop a crush on her riding instructor. And he will take up jogging when he hits forty, and maybe buy a Harley-Davidson, which she will despise, and every day he will go to work and look at all the young men in his office and listen in bars to who they pulled at the weekend or where they went on a jolly and feel like somehow – and he will never be quite sure how – he got suckered.’

I turned.

Will was staring at me.

‘Sorry,’ I said, after a moment. ‘I don’t really know where that came from.’

‘I’m starting to feel just the tiniest bit sorry for Running Man.’

‘Oh, it’s not him,’ I said. ‘It’s working at a cafe for years. You see and hear everything. Patterns, in people’s behaviour. You’d be amazed at what goes on.’

‘Is that why you’ve never got married?’

I blinked. ‘I suppose so.’

I didn’t want to say I had never actually been asked.

It may sound as though we didn’t do much. But, in truth, the days with Will were subtly different – depending on his mood and, more importantly, how much pain he was in. Some days I would arrive and I could see from the set of his jaw that he didn’t want to talk to me – or to anyone –
and, noting this, I would busy myself around the annexe, trying to anticipate his needs so that I didn’t have to bother him by asking.

There were all sorts of things that caused him pain. There were the general aches that came with loss of muscle – there was so much less holding him up, despite Nathan’s best attempts at physio. There was stomach pain from digestive problems, shoulder pain, pain from bladder infections – an inevitability, apparently, despite everyone’s best efforts. He had a stomach ulcer from taking too many painkillers early on in his recovery, when he apparently popped them like Tic Tacs.

Occasionally, there were pressure sores, from being seated in the same position for too long. A couple of times Will was confined to bed, just to let them heal, but he hated being prone. He would lie there listening to the radio, his eyes glittering with barely suppressed rage. Will also got headaches – a side effect, I thought, of his anger and frustration. He had so much mental energy, and nothing to take it out on. It had to build up somewhere.

But the most debilitating was a burning sensation in his hands and feet; relentless, pulsing, it would leave him unable to focus on anything else. I would prepare a bowl of cold water and soak them, or wrap cold flannels around them, hoping to ease his discomfort. A stringy muscle would flicker in his jaw and occasionally he would just seem to disappear, as if the only way he could cope with the sensation was to absent himself from his own body. I had become surprisingly used to the physical requirements of Will’s life. It seemed unfair that despite the fact he could not use them, or feel them,
his extremities should cause him so much discomfort.

Despite all this, Will did not complain. This was why it had taken me weeks to notice he suffered at all. Now, I could decipher the strained look around his eyes, the silences, the way he seemed to retreat inside his own skin. He would ask, simply, ‘Could you get the cold water, Louisa?’ or ‘I think it might be time for some painkillers.’ Sometimes he was in so much pain that his face actually leached colour, turning to pale putty. Those were the worst days.

But on other days we tolerated each other quite well. He didn’t seem mortally offended when I talked to him, as he had at the start. Today appeared to be a pain-free day. When Mrs Traynor came out to tell us that the cleaners would be another twenty minutes, I made us both another drink and we took a slow stroll around the garden, Will sticking to the path and me watching my satin pumps darken in the damp grass.

‘Interesting choice of footwear,’ Will said.

They were emerald green. I had found them in a charity shop. Patrick said they made me look like a leprechaun drag queen.

‘You know, you don’t dress like someone from round here. I quite look forward to seeing what insane combination you’re going to turn up in next.’

‘So how should “someone from round here” dress?’

He steered a little to the left to avoid a bit of branch on the path. ‘Fleece. Or, if you’re my mother’s set, something from Jaeger or Whistles.’ He looked at me. ‘So where did you pick up your exotic tastes? Where else have you lived?’

‘I haven’t.’

‘What, you’ve only ever lived here? Where have you worked?’

‘Only here.’ I turned and looked at him, crossing my arms over my chest defensively. ‘So? What’s so weird about that?’

‘It’s such a small town. So limiting. And it’s all about the castle.’ We paused on the path and stared at it, rising up in the distance on its weird, dome-like hill, as perfect as if it had been drawn by a child. ‘I always think this is the kind of place that people come back to. When they’ve got tired of everything else. Or when they don’t have enough imagination to go anywhere else.’