The Love Market (2 page)

But the butterflies in my stomach tell me it’s clearly not impossible, it really is him, even though I can’t see his eyes because he’s wearing sunglasses, along with light jeans and a smart-casual olive-coloured jacket. I would know him anywhere.

My hand slips away from Mike’s. The blare of horns, a squeal of brakes, a group of Japanese tourists running after a bus, their feet scattering on the ground, then everything is soundless.

‘What’s wrong?’ I hear Mike’s voice, distantly, from beyond the other side of my shock. Memories rush over me, as though it had all been yesterday. As though nothing had happened since. There never was a since. Never a Mike or an Aimee. Never a life. The man I’m convinced is Patrick is stepping off the curb, raising an arm to flag down a taxi, and in a flash this moment will be gone. Time seems to slow right down, giving me ample chance to do something. But do what? I can’t speak or move. I’m a strange mix of wildly excited and ill.

I can only see him side-on, and it’s enough for me to doubt again. The face is heavier. The profile isn’t quite... If only he’d take off those glasses.

Mike takes hold of my arm. ‘What on earth’s wrong with you?’

Patrick is bending now, talking through a taxi driver’s window. I even recognise the shape of his head.

‘Celine?’ Mike says again. I hear the concern in his voice; his fingers grip me tightly.

Is Mike trembling, or is it me? What I do now is going to be one of those pivotal moments that change everything. I know this, and all my instincts say
let it go
.

All but one.

Patrick—if it’s Patrick—is climbing into the back of a taxi, and I am now in such a heightened state of panic that I start trotting toward the taxi, hearing Mike call after me, bemusement and slight annoyance in his voice. But I’ve taken those few steps; the damage is already done. As the taxi starts pulling away, I find myself, inconceivably, starting to run after it.

Then two buses hurtle past, and I can’t see the taxi any more but still my legs have a will of their own. When I’m able to see around the buses, there is now more than one taxi, and I don’t know which one he’s in. But on I go. I’m a high-speed train about to wreck itself. All the while, my common sense is telling me this can’t be Patrick, so what on earth am I doing chasing a stranger?

Then I have a stitch in my side, and a painful airlock in my chest. It crosses my mind that I might be having a heart attack. The buses and taxis are converging at a traffic light, and I have to stop because my body is giving me no other choice.

I flop forward, my breath coming in gulps, thoughts piling on top of each other: I’ve just seen Patrick. Or was it him? The face wasn’t quite… Maybe this man wasn’t as tall.

No. It
was
him. I know it was.

I picture him in a cab now, somewhere gone. Absolutely no chance of ever coming this close to him again. And I remember how I lost him the last time. I can still visualise him standing there, in the dim morning light of his cabin, with his bag packed. And me thinking,
You’ll walk out of this door and I’ll never ever see you again.
And as he left, my reproachful tone: ‘Don’t look back at me once you walk out of this door. Please don’t do it. I won’t be able to handle it.’ And he didn’t. I listened to his feet walking away. With his every step, I was thinking
go after him, he’s only at the tree, he’s only at the road
. Then,
he’ll only be on the bus, he’ll still be at the airport.
Then
, he’s somewhere in Hong Kong, he’s still in Asia…

Like the way I would write my address, when I was a child. Placing where I lived; positioning my small and insignificant self in the broader context of where everything else was: Celine Walker, 22 Duke Street, Newcastle, England, United Kingdom, Europe, World, Earth.

Then I remember my behaviour. When I look down the street, Mike is standing exactly where I left him, as though he has cautioned himself from coming any closer. London returns to real time, but I continue to stand there helpless and inoperative. And I should be thinking only of how I can explain myself to him, but I am imagining the interior of a black cab with Patrick in it gazing out of the window, unaware that our lives have just synchronised again.

Why hadn’t I just called out to him?

I sit down on somebody’s doorstep. And I want to stop the tears for Mike’s sake, but they come anyway. To think we’d been having such a lovely weekend. The earring-shopping; our really nice dinner out. The way we’d linked arms as we walked back to the hotel along the fairy-light-strung Thames Embankment. We chattered all night. Not the routine stuff about his work, my work, the state of the house, the bills, Aimee, but frivolous things, almost flirtatious: or it felt so; maybe it was the wine. Then in bed, his tender kisses down my throat; his hands gripping my bottom under my nightdress. The way he knows my body better than anyone else, yet fails to ever really excite me. And sometimes I’m able to pretend different, and sometimes I can’t.

The coldness of the step penetrates my coat and jeans. All the good things about my life that I don’t want to lose by losing Mike line up in my mind, urging me to remember that Mike is the one I’m with and the one I love. Not someone like Patrick who has spent more time in my fantasies than he ever did in my life. But all I am is numb, defeated before I even try.

Next, I’m staring at Mike’s slightly scuffed brown Clarks as my tears turn cold on my cheeks. When my eyes travel up his body and finally reach his pale face, I can see him waiting for an explanation. Dismay and disappointment gather around him, like a man just realising that there’s something about his wife he doesn’t know. Or maybe he does. Maybe there are things he knows, or suspects, and wishes he didn’t. The weights and measures of a marriage; we know things but we choose not to think about them. We choose to bury our heads in the sand.

Mike says only one thing. ‘That was him, wasn’t it?’

Three Years Later

The mail rustles through the box and falls softly on the carpet. I leave my morning coffee and the newspaper and walk down our short passageway to the front hall.

There’s the usual stuff: bills, flyers, the odd shares certificate for Mike that still comes to this address even though he moved out eight months ago. But it’s the letter-sized white envelope with the solicitor’s return address on the front that stops the casual flicking of my hand.

I walk back into our kitchen, conscious that the rain, which has been spitting on and off all morning, is now lashing on the window like a rushed and eerie whisper through a dream. That stealthy rain that is so common in April, sweeping across the wild and exposed Northumberland moors where we live, in a small rural hamlet, some twenty miles west of Newcastle Upon Tyne, about four hundred miles north of London. The kitchen has suddenly gone dark. I switch on the light and find myself just standing there looking out of the window, at my reflection, as though gazing through a ghost. The letter dangles from my limp hand, its contents on a slow parasail through my mind.

 Beyond our crumbling stone wall, the wispy mauves and taupe and moss green of the rolling moorland are blanketed by a grey slow-swirling mist which is probably in for the day. Our cherry tree has dropped its blossoms all over the grass. They lie there like confetti long after a wedding. I pull out a chair from under the kitchen table and sit there before rereading the letter.

The words are all there, saying what words on a decree absolute are supposed to say, but I can’t quite believe them. I stare at them for so long that they merge and fuzz, and tears burn in my eyes then drop onto the page. I want, irrationally, for them to have the effect of a magic eraser. But when I look again, the words are still there, telling me the same thing.

We had split up before. I can’t even remember why now: something petty and pointless, no doubt. Mike made a transparently unconvincing production of moving out with a tie hanging out of his suitcase, and putting himself up on the couch of a mate from work for five nights. By the Friday he was home, because a) his back was acting up, b) he realised he wasn’t the one who was unhappy: I was, so if anybody should leave, it should be me, and c) we’d planned to go camping in Scotland that weekend and he’d been looking forward to it for ages. But this time when he left, he’d already rented another house. He didn’t want us making up our minds and changing them again because we were too afraid of life without the anchor of each other, too afraid of the ‘over’ in case it was worse than staying together. But somehow, through all the business of him going, I still imagined him coming back.

My phone rings, shocking me for a second, and my first thought is that maybe it’s him. The kitchen table that doubles as my work desk is covered in papers, magazines, client files, questionnaires, surveys, research findings, my empty cereal bowl, old coffee cups, a chocolate wrapper from a Mars Bar. I find the phone just before it stops ringing. A name on my call display. But it’s not his name.

The rain rushes at the window again. I’m cold even though the fire’s on in the living room and it heats the entire main floor of our small, detached, two-storey stone cottage. My gaze goes to the photo of Mike and me on the shelf above the kitchen table. It was taken five years ago at a wedding: my first client’s. Mike’s hair, ever the same
Fonz
style. His straight, almost too perfect teeth, and kind, shyly sexy smile. I am head and shoulders taller than him even minus the hat. But it’s still a good picture of us. Since he left I’ve not once thought of taking it down.

I’ve noticed something lately though. No matter where I stand, those eyes are watching me. Like they’re doing now. They’ve got this uncanny ability to change when the mood demands it. Sometimes they’re smiling, if Aimee and I are locking horns like we do so often. But other times, like now, they are full of pent-up sadness, as though he is choked with words he cannot say, and recognising the frustrating limitations of the fact that he’s just a face in a photograph.

My phone rings again. Someone is persistent. I answer with a flat “Hello,” still unable to drag my eyes from Mike’s. All I see is the un-tidying and untying of two lives, and the barrel of neutrality and pointlessness that I’m now staring down, at my future. It takes me a moment or two to realise that it’s Kim, one of my clients. I run a company called The Love Market, a professional matchmaking service to upper income executives across the North of England. I met Kim three months ago in her Newcastle Quayside office. She runs one of the largest public relations agencies in the country. The friendly smile and instant enquiry about where I’d bought my leopard-print boots made us bond instantly, in a way that only women can do over something as trivial as fashion. The broken capillaries at the base of her nose, that somehow mar her pretty, otherwise-flawless face, with its bottomless blue eyes. The faint neurosis when she suddenly cut me off mid-sentence, picked up the phone and demanded her secretary come in to dust her desk. ‘Allergies,’ she told me. So that explained the nose. But perhaps not the Devil Wears Prada attitude.

Kim has been on three dates with David Hall, a widowed property developer who responded to my advertisement on the bulletin board of an exclusive golf and country club. I had hoped that three dates was a sign that everything was going quite well. ‘I was hoping you might have a minute. Celine,’ she says. ‘Something really awful has just happened to me.’

Kim’s dramatic personality type likes to leave you with a cliff-hanger. This has a way of ensuring that I can’t say,
no, Kim, I do not have a minute, particularly as something terrible has happened to you
.

In Kim’s case, I’m not too worried about how awful her awful is. After all, this is the person who refused to go on a date with a man because his last name was Schmink. A renowned heart surgeon would have been The One, if he’d only had shoulders and, wasn’t “just a pair of arms pinned on either side of his throat.” And then there was handsome, easygoing Frank. What was his crime? Didn’t he just order dessert for himself when she told him she didn’t want any?

‘What happened, Kim?’ I tell myself I have to sound more concerned. Knowing my luck, this could indeed be the one time I’ve love-matched a client with Jeffrey Dahmer II, or someone who keeps albums of teenage girls in his night-table drawer. But the main reason is that Kim has paid me two thousand pounds to match her with ten to twelve men over the course of a year. I take this responsibility seriously and wouldn’t want any of my clients at The Love Market thinking I don’t have their best interests at heart.

‘Celine, I’m just so shocked and disgusted. It was horrible!’

I am guessing it’s a peculiar sexual preference thing, or an odd-looking private part. One thing I have discovered in this business: women will always clinically dissect their sexual encounters with their dates. Whereas my male clients never talk about their dates disrobed, and I’ve never yet heard a man say that the sex wasn’t good enough. I pinch the bridge of my nose and try not to sound like moments ago I was crying. ‘Why don’t you tell me all about it right from the beginning, Kim?’ I say.