One Minute to Midnight (32 page)

‘Well?’ he prompts me.

‘Oh, I don’t remember,’ I say, irritated. ‘I have to repaint the kitchen …’

He starts to laugh. ‘You have to repaint the kitchen?’

‘Oh, fuck off.’

‘That’s what I’m talking about. There was a time when you were planning to drive from the Cape to Cairo, or wanting to learn Mandarin. Now you’re talking about repainting the kitchen.’

‘That’s what growing up is about, Aidan. Not that you’d know, obviously, but there comes a time in your life when you can’t just think about holidays and adventures and having a good time, you have to think about … other things.’

‘The kitchen?’

‘Yes, the fucking kitchen. And marriage and kids …’

‘So you are thinking about having kids?’

I don’t want to have this conversation with him. ‘I don’t want to have this conversation with you,’ I say. ‘It’s none of your business.’

‘Okay.’

We walk on in silence. He reaches for my hand, and I let him take it.

‘I just want to know that you’re happy,’ he says, ‘that you haven’t settled for less than you deserve.’

I drop his hand and fold my arms across my chest. ‘If you’re talking about Dominic, then you’re way off,’ I say. ‘He’s a good man, he’s not a consolation prize. He’s a good husband, he doesn’t hurt me.’

‘Is that right?’ Aidan asks, a harder edge to his voice now. ‘Is that why you and Alex stopped talking?’

‘Fuck you,’ I snap at him and storm off along the deserted walkway. Then I stop and turn around, I storm back again. ‘You have no right, you know that? You have no fucking right to criticise my life, you have no right to question my choices, you have no right to talk to me about Alex or Dom. Especially Dom. He may not be perfect, it may not be the love affair that I had with you, but he does not break my fucking heart every chance he gets.’

‘That’s not fair, I never wanted to hurt you, Nicole …’ There’s hurt in his eyes, I’ve wounded him more than I intended, more than I thought I could. ‘I know I fucked up, I know I made a lot of mistakes. Laure was one of the big ones.’

‘You fell in love with her,’ I say, my voice a little softer now. ‘I suppose I can’t really hold that against you.’

He stops walking. ‘I didn’t love her. I never loved her,’ he says. ‘I thought I did, for a while, but it turns out that it was always you.’ He reaches out to me again, slipping his hand around my waist and into the small of my back, pulling me closer to him, brushing my hair back from my face. This is the point at which I should pull away, but I don’t want to. I want to stay here with him, breathing in the scent of his skin, feeling his hands on me, this is where I want to be.

‘I don’t know what my life would have been if I hadn’t loved you.’ He kisses me on the mouth and I’m going back in time again, his lips on mine feel exactly the way they did when he kissed me on the beach in South Africa fifteen years ago. No other kiss has felt like that since.

‘The thing I never realised, back then, was that I didn’t have all the time in the world,’ he says. ‘It wasn’t until Julian died and you got married that it occurred to me that you were gone, you were really gone. I couldn’t have you. I’d always thought we’d end up together. I knew we’d end up together. You’re everything to me, you always have been. It just took me for ever to realise it.’

He’s saying all the things I ever wanted to hear from him and I can’t stand it, it’s too late. I pull away from him.

‘It took you too long, Aidan.’ I smile at him although I really want to cry. ‘It’s like what my dad said to me the other day. It’s always later than you think.’

We’ve reached the Gaansevoort Plaza, the end of the High Line. Below is the Meatpacking District, packed with bars and boutiques. Alex and I talked about coming here, to have brunch at Pastis, just like the girls from
Sex and the City
did. We take the steps back down to street level.

‘I should be getting back,’ I tell Aidan. ‘Dom will be wondering where I am.’

‘Can I see you again before you go?’ he asks.

‘No, you can’t Aidan. It’s time we said goodbye.’

I hail a cab and leave him standing at the intersection of 8th and Greenwich Avenue. It takes all my willpower to not look back at him, to see if he’s waving, or if he’s already turned away.

Chapter Eighteen

New Year’s Eve 2008

Lamu, Kenya

Resolutions:

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

IT WAS DOMINIC’S idea to take our honeymoon over the New Year. It wasn’t my choice: I was quite happy to leave it until the following summer, but Dom, who had never shown himself to be superstitious about anything up to that point, was adamant that it was bad luck not to honeymoon in the actual calendar year in which you get married, so it was our last chance.

We flew to Nairobi on the anniversary of Julian’s death. I self-medicated fairly heavily on the flight: four gin and tonics and half a bottle of red. It took us a couple of hours to get out of Nairobi Airport, I spent most of that time in the toilets throwing up, then we transferred to another, smaller airport and got onto another, much smaller plane for the sixty-minute flight to Manda Island.

I was feeling better by this point, and not just because I’d purged most of the alcohol from my system. Coming back to Africa made me feel better, it always did. There was something irresistibly invigorating about the noise and chaos, the heat and space, all that blood-red earth. We landed on Manda at around five o’clock, there was nothing there but an airstrip and a little wooden hut, on which someone had hung a painted sign saying ‘departure lounge’.

We – Dom and I, plus three other couples (from the looks of them, honeymooners too), and one set of exhausted-looking parents plus their two small children – were escorted to the shore and helped into two small boats, which ferried us across the narrow stretch of water which separates Manda from Lamu Island. I sat in between Dom’s skinny white legs at the back of the boat, leaning against him, watching as the setting sun caught the top of the whitewashed roofs of Lamu village, and I felt at peace. Maybe this had been a good idea after all. This is exactly the sort of thing Julian would have wanted me to do on the anniversary of his death, had he been around to make recommendations.

I’d spent a lot of time that year thinking about what Julian would have wanted me to do. Mostly, I think I’d gone against his wishes. I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have approved of my abandonment of two film projects I’d been working on for months. I doubt very much he’d have thought that marrying Dominic was the best idea. Not under the circumstances, anyway.

We got married in March. It was about as low key a wedding as is possible: just me, Dom, Mum, Charles, Dom’s parents, Matt and Liz and Alex and Karl at the Chelsea Town Hall on a brisk Friday morning. I wore a pale-gold draped silk chiffon dress from Lanvin, Dom wore his best suit. We all took taxis to Petersham afterwards and had a fabulous lunch at the Nurseries. Nobody made any speeches. Everyone had a good time, except for Dom’s mum who said the whole thing was so sad it made her want to weep.

Since I’d never been the sort to want to dress up like a princess, it was exactly the sort of wedding I probably would have chosen even had I not been grieving. But that wasn’t really the point. It was the timing of the thing that caught everyone off guard. I could tell that even Dom was a little taken aback when, three weeks after the funeral, I told him I thought we ought to get married.

‘I thought you said you weren’t ready,’ he said.

‘I changed my mind,’ I replied.

‘I don’t even have a ring,’ he said.

‘You’ve been asking me to marry you for three years, Dominic. How can you not have a ring?’

‘I just … I don’t know. I suppose I thought I had at least another four or five New Years to go until you said yes.’

‘I don’t want a ring,’ I said. ‘I don’t need a ring. Let’s just do this quickly. No fuss, no tiaras, no bridesmaids, no churches. Okay?’

He agreed, and he didn’t ask more questions about why I’d changed my mind. I suppose he didn’t want to press the point. Alex did.

‘Are you sure?’ she asked me. ‘Why now? You know they say that you shouldn’t make any major decisions within six months of somebody dying. Or is it within six months of winning the lottery? Something like that, anyway. I don’t think this is the best time to be making life-changing decisions. Imagine what Jules would say.’

‘Julian is gone,’ I said, bluntly. For some reason I couldn’t bear to hear her talk about him. I couldn’t bear to hear anyone talk about him.

‘Yes, I know Nic, but—’

‘Well stop bringing him up, then. This has nothing to do with him. This is about Dominic and me. And it’s time. I want to get married.’

Unlike Dom, Alex wasn’t prepared to let the subject drop just like that. A few days after I’d phoned her to tell her that Dom and I were getting married, she rang me to ask me to meet her for drinks at the Duke of York off Gray’s Inn Road.

‘I have to see my lawyer,’ she told me. ‘Always a horrible experience. I’ll need to get pissed afterwards.’

I didn’t want to go. Getting pissed with Alex wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. Plus, the weather was filthy, cold and wet, with a northern wind blasting through my corner of Brixton as though it were stuck out on some peninsula instead of being sheltered by the council blocks of the Loughborough estate.

By the time I arrived, it appeared to me that Alex had a head start; she was garrulous and louder than usual, laughing at things that weren’t particularly funny. She launched into what seemed to be to be an ill-prepared ‘marry in haste, repent at leisure’ speech, illustrating her points with numerous examples from her own marriage, then in its spectacularly vicious death throes. I countered easily.

‘One,’ I told her, ‘you didn’t marry in haste. You were with Mike for years before you married him. And I’ve been with Dom for more than four years, so it’s not really that hasty, is it? And two,’ I went on, ‘much more importantly, Dom is not Mike. Surely even you can see that?’

‘All right,’ she said, a look of hurt flickering across her face. Then, she asked: ‘What do you mean,
even
me?’

‘Nothing,’ I said, crossly. I drained the rest of my drink. I wanted to leave, but I’d only just got there. Outside, it looked like the end of days, the rain hammering down, monsoon-like.

‘Let’s have another,’ Alex suggested. She went to the bar, and instead of buying two more glasses of wine, she bought a bottle. My heart sank.

‘Cheaper this way,’ she said cheerily, pouring us each another glass. Then she started up on the marriage thing again.

‘I know that you love Dom,’ she said, ‘and I’m not saying that marrying him is not the right thing to do, I just think you might live to regret a decision made in grief …’

‘Don’t talk to me about my grief, Alex,’ I said, pushing my glass to the centre of the table. I’d had enough. I couldn’t face this. ‘You have no idea what I’m feeling. You have no idea what it’s like for me.’

I got to my feet and started putting on my coat. Alex reached out to grab my hand, there were tears in her eyes. ‘Nicole, don’t go. I just want to talk to you. Please, Nic. I loved him too you know …’

‘Don’t do that!’ I snapped, pulling my hand away from hers. ‘Don’t compare your relationship with him to mine, there is no comparison. You didn’t have what we had.’ I grabbed my handbag and walked out into the rain, knowing that I would have hurt her less if I’d stuck a knife into her chest, and having no idea why I was doing it. We’d not spoken much since.

Our little boat dropped us off at a jetty outside the Peponi Hotel, a low, whitewashed building clinging to the south-western edge of the island, surrounded by tall palms and lush lawns. A tall, white-haired gentleman with a deep tan and a Scandinavian accent welcomed us off the boat.

‘Karibu
,’ he said his arms outstretched. ‘Welcome to Lamu.’

We sat on sun loungers on the terrace outside the hotel bar, our fingers gently interlaced, sipping gin and tonics, watching the sun dip into the sea. A warm, salty breeze came up off the water, lulling us towards sleep. I resisted.

‘I’ve decided I’m going to wind up the company,’ I told Dom. He opened his eyes and looked over at me, a look of concern on his face.

‘Really? Are you sure?’

I shrugged. ‘We haven’t made anything all year,’ I said. ‘I’m just losing money on office space and employees. I think I’m done with all that now.’

‘Okay,’ he said, giving my hand a squeeze. ‘If you think that’s best.’

‘I do. Maybe I’ll write instead, or … I don’t know.’

‘You don’t have to work,’ Dom said. ‘You could just take it easy for a while.’

‘I want to work,’ I replied, ‘I just don’t feel like travelling any more. Not unless it’s doing stuff, like this.’ I leant over and kissed him on the lips.

‘Good, I’m glad. I want my wife at home.’