The Last Time I Saw You (5 page)

I push my palms against the wall, needing to feel the solidity of bricks and mortar, of the world that holds me.
How fragile that holding is, however much we delude ourselves that we’re safe. I miss you, I think. Or is it that I miss the feeling state—a friendship for which friendship is far too flimsy a word? A friendship that creeps into all the hidden spaces inside yourself and turns them inside out, exposing them to the light. But with you—every single shard of sunlight was equaled by the shadow that lay behind it, ready to blot it out at a moment’s notice.

I head for the garden, suddenly struggling to get enough air into my lungs. There are a few people milling around on the lawn, and I back away, unable to endure any more constipated conversation. I inch my way around the side of the house, hoping to find somewhere to hide.

There is William. He’s holding his phone, just looking at the screen, a lit cigarette in his other hand. He takes a deep drag on it, then spots me.

“I’m sorry I—”

“No, please don’t apologize,” he says, guiltily dropping it and grinding it into the ground before picking it up and neatly secreting in the packet. “So sorry, disgusting habit. I don’t think we’ve met.”

It is a horrible habit, and oddly nihilistic at a funeral. Sally always loved her Marlboro Lights, but even she, I would have thought, would have given them up by now. I chide myself for being so judgmental: surely he’s entitled to whatever props he needs to get him through today?

“I’m Olivia.”

I don’t know whether it’s my imagination, but I feel like it shakes him.

“You’re Olivia?”

“Yes,” I say, self-conscious. What did she say? If she told him that I pleaded with her not to marry him, he’ll surely want me seen off the premises.

“You’re Olivia!” he says again, smiling. I can’t quite work out if this one reaches his eyes. “The card you sent when Madeline was born had pride of place on our mantelpiece.”

“Really?” I say, trying to keep the shock from my voice. It was the last time I tried to breach the gap—stupidly, naively hopeful that giving birth would have transformed Sally into some kind of beatific madonna, her hard edges planed off and replaced by something yielding and soft. In a moment of madness I decided to write a poem, something I used to love doing at university, then felt doubly humiliated when the only response was stony silence.

“Oh yes. It was never a case of out of sight, out of mind. She was terribly cast down when you couldn’t come to the wedding.”

Is it remotely possible that my invitation got lost in the post? Of course not: I hate that Sally’s still making me question my own knowing, even in death. I consider William, my heart thumping inside my chest, trying to work out how to pick my way through the marshy ground of our conversation. It’s funny—looking at him now I realize I was both right and wrong when I made my sharp, bruised little assumptions on the basis of those wedding pictures. I spotted that honesty in the joy that he exuded, but I’d assumed it was puppyish, that Sally had picked up yet another acolyte. There’s a strength about him I couldn’t have divined, a surety about his presence that’s far more fundamental than that horrible sense of entitlement that’s drummed into public schoolboys as their birthright. He’s even taller than he looked—of course, now I think about it, Sally would inevitably have worn the kind of heels that made walking
up the aisle as treacherous as an ice rink—with a comforting kind of solidity to his body. I can’t imagine he’s packing a six pack under the charcoal suit that he wears like a second skin, but his bulkiness adds to that sense of presence. It’s his eyes that I like most. They’re soft and dark—deep set, with a kindness about them that isn’t extinguished by the pain that they radiate.

“So you know who I am?” I ask, hesitant.

“Know who you are? Madeline’s middle name is Olivia.” I can feel the blood draining from my face. I remember her, that very first night. “O-liv-ia,” she said, like she’d never heard anything more ridiculous. “She very much regretted you drifting apart.”

Drifting: it sounds so gentle, so dreamy, so unlike the Sally I knew. I’m falling, losing my footing in the chasm between the girl I knew and the woman he describes.

“Yes, me too,” I say, the words as dry as sawdust in my mouth. I should go: I should go before my anger starts to spit and bubble and show itself against my will. I feel like I’m in that children’s party game, the one I always hated, where they blindfold you and spin you around and around, your friends transformed into unidentifiable enemies who will only stop once you’re too sick and dizzy to do anything but beg for mercy. William shoots a quick, surreptitious glance at his phone when he thinks I’m not looking. Why am I even here? It must be torture for him to have to endure more small talk. “I ought to go back,” I say, expecting him to sag with relief, but instead he looks almost disappointed. I grope for the right words. “I’m so, so sorry. Please know if there’s anything I can do—”

“There is,” he says, jumping in. “Just sharing your memories of Sally at a time when I didn’t know her will help Madeline and me immeasurably. I know that you were the
best of friends at Leeds—I want her to have the fullest possible sense of who her mother was.”

Anxiety races up and down inside me like a child playing a scale with the gleeful swipe of a single finger. Why is he asking me, of all people? If he knows what close friends we were, he must also know that I didn’t simply disappear in a puff of smoke. I’ve got that acute sense again that we’re talking about a different person, and yet, if what Lola says is true, he must be wrestling with his own sense of the world spinning dizzyingly fast.

“I could try . . .” I say, hating myself for my own reluctance. I don’t know how to do this, I want to tell him; I don’t know how to lay my version of Sally next to yours and not taint it. A coldness crosses his face, like he’s snapped up the drawbridge and retreated into the gray depths of the castle. Who can blame him? I must seem to him like nothing more than a grief tourist, taking a day trip into his pain and gawking at it before blithely returning to normal life. “No, please do call me,” I say, reaching out instinctively to touch his arm, to breach the gap between us, but it’s stiff and rigid under my fingers. “I’ll write down my number for you,” I add, embarrassed, yanking my hand away and searching my handbag for a pen.

“Thank you,” he says, and I look up, struck by the cadence of his voice. It seems to contain a depth of feeling, his thank you, and I hold his gaze for a second, trying to convey to him that my reluctance wasn’t born out of indifference or laziness. It was fear, pure and simple. His phone erupts in his hand, breaking the moment. “I need to take this,” he says, his face suddenly grim, all vulnerability gone.

“Goodbye,” I mouth, backing away, but I don’t think he even sees me. I can hear him as I round the corner.

“I can only congratulate you on your impeccable timing,” he says, his voice full of cold, controlled fury. “To ask this of me at any time would be extraordinary, but to ask it today absolutely beggars belief.”

CHAPTER THREE

Shock is a strange thing; time seems to have developed a mind of its own, galloping ahead and wheeling backward like an angry animal. It’s the day after the funeral and I’m feeling more discombobulated than ever. Now it’s happened, now I’ve had to accept the extraordinary truth that Sally really was confined within that wooden box, was committed to the ground, I’ve lost the option of denial. I feel different: I feel like a person who knows something that the Livvy of last month, or even last week, had no idea about. The outside of my life is a carbon copy—the hot water and lemon I always have first thing, the eight-fifteen exit for the tube—but I’ve been switched off autopilot. The world feels fragile and sharp, its colors and noises assailing me like burning fat spitting up from a pan.

James has left at his normal time too, six-thirty, early enough to swim halfway across the virtual Channel before his first meeting. He’s left a note propped up against the
granola:
Chin up mate
, it says, with an
x
: I slip it into my handbag before I go.

The tube feels like an assault course. I stand back, quietly observing the frantic commuters contorting themselves into a section of space that could only accommodate a No. 2 pencil, faces mashed up against the glass like a Munch painting. All that effort feels pointless, energy that’s being poured into the wrong place. I watch four trains going past before I realize that I haven’t metamorphosed into an existentialist philosopher, and that I too must subject myself to the indignity of the Victoria line. It’s horrible in there, airless and close, my heart beating out a tattoo in my chest. Must not cry, must not cry. It spits me out at Warren Street, shaky and distressed. I get myself above ground, gulping in air as I search for emotional equilibrium. I can’t help but think of William, how it must have felt to wake up to today, how wrong it must seem that life has viciously kick-started itself again, the funeral nothing more than a memory. Would he even want to carry on if it wasn’t for Madeline? I think he would—despite his love for Sally, I sensed a stoicism in him that was about more than being a father. Was that what she saw in him, that he made her feel safe? The Sally that I knew was too fearless to fall for any knights in shining armor. I can’t stop myself from trying to fill in the blanks, even though I know that it’s pointless. Who was it that he was arguing so fiercely with when I crept away from him?

I decide that a double-shot macchiato might help pull me back to the real world, particularly if it’s delivered by the sexy Aussie barista at the trendy coffee place around the corner from work.

“You okay?” he asks. “You know there’s nothing in the world that a brownie can’t fix.”

“You’re right,” I say, promptly bursting into tears at the fact that it’s patently untrue.

“Hey,” he says, handing me a wad of paper napkins, “you’re having a shocker, aren’t you?”

“I am,” I reply, gratefully mopping my face. “Thank you.” I’m smiling at him a little too intensely, my gratitude for his kindness almost overwhelming. If our grip on life is as tenuous as I now know it is, then maybe this is all we’ve got: the minute-to-minute choice to be the best versions of ourselves we can muster up.

“Good morning,” says Mungo brightly, surreptitiously shoving a copy of the
New Yorker
under a pile of folders.

I’m actually relieved that I’m irritated. I obviously haven’t had a complete spiritual epiphany.

“Hi. Did you write up the notes from that directors’ meeting?”

“You’ll have them before you know it,” he says, then swivels his chair back toward his screen like I’m harassing him.

I roll my eyes at Rosie, my kindly, motherly colleague who sits on the next station.

“Cup of tea?” she signals, and I hold up my coffee in response. “Go on,” she mouths, and I slip out to the kitchen, keeping an eye on Mary’s vacant desk. Hopefully she’s gone to make a long personal phone call, rather than for a ruthlessly efficient fifteen-second pee.

“Poor you, it must’ve been terrible,” she says, giving me a hug. I’ve been trying so hard to switch back into work mode, and just for a second I allow myself to collapse into it.

“I can’t even tell you . . .” I say.

“At least you’ve got it out of the way,” she says quickly. “I know how much you were dreading it.” She gives me a big, open smile, hands tucked in the pocket of her roomy floral pinafore dress, and I feel a bit like her three-year-old son Alfie must when he’s fallen off the slide and she’s trying to persuade him to be brave.

“It doesn’t feel out of the way . . .” It doesn’t, it feels accordion-like, stretching and contracting, as I try to make sense of things that refuse to submit to small-minded logic.

“It’s the shock,” she says, rubbing my arm. “Now do you want black tea or herbal?”

I think about trying to explain, but it feels too hard to marshal everything that’s churning around inside me, the unanswered questions that yesterday threw up. Besides, she doesn’t know about me and Sally’s murky history—she thinks she’s no more than an old pal I lost touch with—I can’t face peeling back the flesh of it and revealing the bone and sinew that lie beneath.

“Black, definitely.” She smiles kindly, relieved I’ve submitted to the most British form of comfort, splashing boiling water into our cups. I can feel the crackle of it, loud and scalding. “How’s Alfie?” I ask, determinedly steering a path back toward normality.

“He’s furious the babysitter’s got a new little girl coming. He tried to ram an ochre Crayola up her bottom yesterday.”

Just then Honey, Mary’s rail-thin, Alexa Chung–like assistant, arrives.

“There you are!” she says admonishingly, casting a disapproving look at the spare layer of flesh that Rosie carelessly failed to shed post Alfie. “Mary’s called a flash meeting. You need to be in the board room ASAP.”

We grab our mugs and run like the wind, schoolgirls summoned by the headmistress. Mary’s at the top of the boardroom table, entirely focused on her iPhone despite the six servants who are sitting around her, poised and ready to do her bidding. She’s wearing a loud, pink jumpsuit with ostentatious silver snaps running up her toned tummy. It’s garish, particularly combined with the cascading gold hoop earrings she’s wearing, but it’s a statement of intent, and a very expensive one at that—it reminds us that she’s forceful enough to carry an ensemble like that off and somehow make it work.

Charlotte, a viperous senior creative who’s recently been parachuted in from another firm, has positioned herself at Mary’s right-hand side. She’s as groomed and glossy as a show pony, utterly focused on the pursuit of success. I’m not sure that she’s the artistic genius she’s been painted, but that level of self-belief ensures results. I admire it, in a way, but it doesn’t stop Rosie and me calling her Robot Girl behind her back. I think Mary knows how ruthless she is, but she’s a firm believer in healthy competition: my worry is that there is no such thing.

Eventually Mary deigns to look up.

“All present and correct,” she says, then looks to me. “Hello, Livvy, I hope yesterday went as well as something so awful
can
go.”

“Thank you,” I reply, smiling gratefully, but she’s already moved her attention. That’s the thing about Mary, she can be incredibly human when she wants to be. Shortly after I broke up with Marco she found me crying in the loos midmorning—I braced myself for a reprimanding, but instead she canceled her meeting and marched me around the corner for a cup of tea. “There’s a saying,”
she told me, pushing a calorific treat in my direction. “Make sure when the clock goes off you’re not sitting next to a St. Bernard. And you’re just too savvy for that.” I loved her for it—loved her for caring, loved her for perceiving something that I knew to be true of myself. My loyalty to her is pretty unshakeable, despite the fact that work often feels like an assault course.

“Today is a very exciting day for this firm,” she’s saying, “and let me tell you why. It’s not because new business is down fifteen percent.” Oh God, maybe this is a Mary-style segue into a downsizing announcement. Everyone looks stricken, even though the downturn is across the board, and she takes a moment to savor our discomfort. “No one could blame the people around this table for that,” she concedes eventually. “No, we need to think differently in a climate like this. We will survive on our excellence, and one of the best ways to demonstrate it is with pro bono work. Last night I had dinner with Flynn Gerrard.” Gerrard’s a gorgeous Irish actor who made it big in Hollywood, but, truth be told, hasn’t had a box office smash in a good five years. He veers between obtuse indie flicks and big budget action films, none of which reproduce his massive early success. “I know, it’s a tough life,” adds Mary with a self-deprecating giggle.

“Was he inthanely handsome?” lisps Charlotte, emboldened by Mary’s good cheer. Charlotte has patented a nauseating strain of girlishness that she uses to try and cloak her scheming.

“If you like that kind of thing,” says Mary without much warmth. “Flynn spent his early life in Africa, and is planning to take the next year out to devote himself to putting something back.” Translation: Flynn can’t net a good script
for love or money, and is desperately searching for another way to raise his dwindling profile. Actors, you’ve gotta love them. “He’s actually a wonderful man,” adds Mary, and I chide myself. Since when did I become so cynical? If he has realized that life is short, that we’ve got only a limited time to do what it is that we’re here to do, then I couldn’t agree with him more. Stupid, disobedient tears spring up behind my eyes, Sally’s presence almost tangible. Fragments of the times we spent together keep whirling up in my mind’s eye, like the spin of a kaleidoscope. I think about excusing myself and running to the loos, but I force the feeling down, and ask a question instead: if I act normal, perhaps I’ll start to feel normal.

“Is he setting up a charity?”

“It’s a trust,” says Mary, “which is going to give out grants to give deprived young women life-changing educational opportunities. He wants to raise money in Hollywood, and also here.”

Surely if he just donated his take-home pay from playing a loose-boweled rock star in
Sh*t Happens 2
, an ill-judged, multimillion-pound gross-out movie from last year, he’d be able to educate a whole university’s worth.

“How inthpiring,” says Charlotte, sweeping her perfectly blow-dried flaxen locks up into a ponytail like she’s readying herself for action.

“So here’s my thinking. Two teams: a couple of weeks to come up with a pitch for a print campaign that will cut across all those bleeding heart liberal pleas for cash and make an impact. Now who wants to lead?”

I can feel myself physically shrinking, every part of me recoiling from the idea. There’s no lack of candidates; Charlotte’s straining forward like a slice of thin white bread
popping from a toaster, and Chris Minky, a copywriter at my level, is apparently foolhardy enough to want to take her on. Mary looks straight through him, her gaze—oh God—her gaze alighting on me.

“Livvy . . .”

“Thank you, Mary, but . . . I don’t think I’m in the right head space this week . . . Chris would be great. Or Amy . . .”

I trail off, her stony silence the only cue I need. I know nonnegotiable when I see it.

“So there we have it, Livvy versus Charlotte. I’m expecting great things.”

“May the betht woman win,” says Charlotte, extending a bony hand over the table, a fat lozenge of a diamond hovering on her ring finger. “In all seriouthness, Olivia, good luck.” She cocks her head prettily and smiles without any discernible cheer.

“Ditto,” I say, my hand trapped in hers a second or two longer than I would like—despite its bloodless appearance, she has a surprisingly vise-like grip.

Mary swiftly divvies up the teams, leaving me with a crowd of doleful-looking colleagues, all sensing inevitable defeat. Before my team can slip out, I take them into an adjoining meeting room. I’ve got to push through.

“We can do this. We just need to make a plan.”

“No offense, Livvy,” says Chris, “but she’s a force of nature. She’s got a cabinet full of awards.”

I look at him, exasperated by his casual assumption that he would have done such a vastly superior job. I sort of like Chris, but he’s a bit of a moaner. He should be attractive, but he’s too vain, the kind of man who’d use up all your moisturizer and then whine that it had run out. I need to get him on my side: there’s so much that’s pulling me away, and I
don’t want to fail. I saw the complicated look that Mary gave me when she pushed the task on me against my will—despite her flash of sympathy, she needs to see that I know how to let professional take precedence over personal.

“We’ll do research, we’ll look at campaigns for completely unrelated products that have worked, we’ll look at his films and see if there’s a pattern to his taste. It’s totally winnable.”

Rosie gives me an encouraging smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes, while Chris continues to exude his poisonous combination of resentment and disbelief. When my phone starts to ring I could almost cry with relief. Of course I should ignore it, but today is asking too much of me and it feels like a parachute.

It’s an unfamiliar number, so I duck out of the office to take the call. I know Mary likes to keep her beady eye on us, but open-plan working is madly inefficient—there’s always hordes of people congregated like pigeons in the corridor, furtively squawking into their cell phones.

“Olivia?” says an unfamiliar cut-glass voice. Hardly anyone calls me that.

“Yes?”

“It’s William Harrington, Sally’s husband.”

“William, hi.” I want to ask him how he is, but it feels too crass. “I’ve . . . I’ve been thinking about you.”

“Thank you,” he says, stiffly. “I hope you won’t think it presumptuous to follow up on our conversation at . . . yesterday but I would very much like to talk to you about Sally.”

“Oh,” I say, my voice no more than a squeak.

“Please say if this is too soon, but I wondered about tomorrow evening? I’m not sure how long we’ll be here and I don’t want to let the opportunity slip through my fingers.”