The Love of My Life (25 page)

‘No, it’s not that, I’d love to.’ Marc smiled widely. ‘I just never thought you’d, you know . . .’

‘What?’

‘Ask me on a date. God, you know how I feel about you, Liv. I’ve been dreaming of this for years.’

I could think of no way to ameliorate the situation. Any use of the words ‘just’ or ‘friends’ would have been too wounding. So instead I ignored him and said breezily, ‘OK! Will you come and call for me about six?’

‘I’ll be there, don’t worry.’

‘There’ll be lots of free drink and food and stuff and they’ve got a comedian for the cabaret. Probably be really boring but . . .’

‘No, no, it sounds great. Better than being stuck here listening to Mama trying to get Luca to show a bit of interest in the colour of the napkins. By the way, what was it you wanted him for?’

I shrugged. ‘Oh, it was nothing. Just a message from Mum about something to do with the ushers at the church.’

‘Shall I get him to call you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes, please.’

forty-five

Watersford in the summer was beautiful, a city of trees and gardens. The May blossom lasted well into June, scenting the warm evening air with the fragrance of honey. The late-evening light turned the buildings apricot and pink and people sat outside pubs with their jumpers round their waists and their shirtsleeves rolled up and drank cold beer and smiled.

After the trip to Ireland, I was glad to be back in my flat, on my own. I was sleeping better because I was getting up earlier and my appetite had returned. I felt healthier. I realized there were parts of my daily ritual that I actually quite enjoyed. I didn’t call Marc and he didn’t call me, and I dared to hope that we had survived both the bereavement and the affair without anybody being hurt. I missed him, but it was nothing compared to the missing of Luca and even that wasn’t so bad now, not so weighty.

I’d taken to stopping in the café every morning for coffee and toast. The bodybuilder chef and I were friends now. He was called Chris. I looked forward to our conversations. Chris was always very well informed due to starting work so early. He listened to Radio Four while he fried up the first eggs for the early commuters and the council workers coming off night shift. Because I was always in the café at the same time of day, I began to recognize the regular clientele, and they recognized me. We enquired after each other’s health and well-being. I learned the names of wives, husbands and children. I knew whose nephew played bass in a rock band called Mumm-Ra, whose mother had won £100 on a scratchcard, who was studying Spanish at evening class and whose four-year-old had been diagnosed with autism. Accidentally, I had become part of a close-knit and diverse little community.

After the café, I would walk to work. Jenny always got there before me, even on her hangover days and sore-feet days after a long shift at the noodle bar. Sometimes the professor came, sometimes he didn’t. Either way I would switch on my computer, organize my notes while it buzzed into life and then type in more carefully researched information about Marian Rutherford. It was a story unfolding in no particular order in front of my eyes, and I had begun to look forward to the next piece of information.

I would tuck my feet under my chair, and put my mug of coffee on one side of the keyboard and the sheaf of notes on the other, together with a huge old dictionary, its pages soft and yellow, and a coloured pencil for marking any part of the manuscript that was illegible, undecipherable and unguessable.

Meanwhile the professor was his usual quiet, shadowy self. He paid me small kindnesses and compliments, but always in a manner that suggested he was going through the motions. He didn’t try to persuade me to talk about myself and he didn’t mention his own experience again, for which I was grateful. I had never met anybody before who moved so effortlessly amongst people, but who gave away so little of himself. It was as if he shed no skin, exhaled no carbon dioxide and left no fingerprints. One day, I thought, maybe there would be a time when it would be right to talk. In the meantime, he didn’t pry beneath any of my rocks. At work there was no anxiety. The big, light, untidy office was a haven to me and to the professor too.

Then, three weeks after our return from Ireland, I heard from Marc. I switched on my phone after a particularly pleasant day at work and there were several missed calls from Marc, and a message saying not to call him under any circumstances.

My knees went weak.

‘Is everything all right, Olivia?’ asked the professor, who had come out of the history department behind me in order to lock the door.

‘Yes, fine,’ I said.

He didn’t look convinced.

‘You’ve gone a very funny colour.’

‘Just a bit of bad news.’

‘Is there anything I can do?’

‘No, no, thank you, it’s nothing serious.’

I said, ‘Goodbye, have a nice weekend,’ and set off at a fast walk in the direction of Fore Street.

Mrs McGuire was back and had said something to Angela. She must have done. I was oblivious to the beauty of the city as I tried to compose an alibi to explain my presence at one of southern Ireland’s most famous beauty spots at the same time as Marc. Just because we were together didn’t necessarily mean anything, as Marc had pointed out. Incredible coincidences take place all the time. People bump into one another in the strangest places, I thought, and then I thought, Yes, in books and films they do.

Back at the flat, I drank two glasses of wine one after the other and then changed into my jeans and one of Luca’s old, unwashed T-shirts, and went out again.

I hadn’t meant to become involved in an affair, I really hadn’t, and I was sure Marc hadn’t either. It had been an unconscious thing, our coming together, a reaction to the pain of losing Luca and a way of alleviating the grief. It had been selfish and dangerous, but sort of inevitable, and now we had come to our senses we had done the right thing. We had decided to stop seeing one another in any way except as brother and sister-in-law. We had agreed that the death that had brought us together was the reason we now had to part. Hadn’t we?

The thought of Luca was enough to turn my feet in the direction of the cemetery, but although it was still light the gates were already locked.

Some of the old loneliness and the frustration at being separated from Luca returned. I couldn’t bear the thought of wandering around Watersford on a Friday evening on my own, so I turned back the way I had come and was just going into the off-licence when Marc called.

He was trying to sound calm, but it was clear from the furtive tone of voice that this was a panic call.

‘Where are you?’

‘At home. In the flat.’

‘But that noise . . . ?’

‘I’m in the bathroom. I’ve put the shower on so Nathalie can’t hear. She’s watching me.’

I stepped back out of the shop and walked a little way down the street, moving back against the wall to make way for a gang of cheerful teenagers.

‘What’s happened? Does she know?’

‘She thinks I’m seeing you.’

My heart gave a little jump. I could feel the muscle squeezing itself in fright.

‘Oh God.’

‘Don’t worry, she doesn’t know anything for sure, but . . .’

‘Mrs McGuire! She told Angela?’

‘No, no, it’s nothing to do with Mrs McGuire.’

I bent over in relief, rubbing my forehead with my hand and feeling nauseous.

‘Oh, thank goodness. It’s just a suspicion then. And it’s OK because we aren’t seeing each other any more. Apart from Mrs McGuire there’s nothing to ever put us together.’

I heard Marc sigh. Over the storm of the shower water I heard him sigh like a man who fears all is lost.

‘What? Marc, what is it?’

‘It’s not just a suspicion. She found the photo.’

‘What photo?’

‘The photo of you on my phone.’

I was genuinely confused.

‘You’ve got a photo of me on your phone?’

‘You know, the one I took of you on the beach.’

‘But you said you’d deleted it . . .’

‘I couldn’t. It was all I had of you.’

This time I sank right down on my heels. My breath was coming in short little gasps. My fingertips were tingling, my mouth was dry.

‘I’m so sorry . . .’

‘Oh Marc, oh God! I was practically naked. What are we going to do?’

‘Are you all right, love?’ A powder-faced old lady was leaning down over me.

I looked up and nodded, but I wasn’t all right.

‘Has somebody attacked you?’

‘No, really, I’m all right, thank you.’

The old lady probably thought I was a drug addict. She looked at me suspiciously, but she wandered away. She had a tiny little dirty-white dog on the end of a lead. The dog looked on its last legs.

‘Marc? Are you still there?’

‘Yes.’

‘What did you tell her?’

‘I told her Luca sent me the picture last summer.’

‘But why would he do that?’

‘Well, he might have done. You looked so sexy. I told her I’d just forgotten it was there.’

‘Did she believe you?’

‘I don’t know, Liv. You know how she feels about you. Even if she does believe me, she’s pretty upset.’

‘Poor Nathalie,’ I whispered.

I stood up again, breathing coming a little easier, and shook my head.

‘I can’t believe you kept the picture. I can’t believe it.’

‘Well, it’s gone now.’

‘And she has nothing to fear because what we had is over.’

‘You believe that?’

‘We agreed it was over on the plane.’

‘I’m finding it hard without you,’ said Marc. ‘I can’t just switch off grief or love or whatever this is. That picture, it felt like it was all I had left of you.’

‘Enough, Marc.’

‘If she calls you . . .’

‘I know what the story is now.’

‘I’m sorry, Liv, I . . .’

But I had had enough. I was tired of Marc, tired of feeling anxious, tired of the whole business.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I said. ‘Have your shower. Leave me alone.’

forty-six

Luca came round to my house. It was late-ish. I’d had a bath and was sitting cross-legged on my bed, in my pyjamas, listening to Bob Marley. My hair was wet and I was twisting it into tiny plaits so that when I combed it out in the morning it would all be wavy and would look nice for the party. I heard a gentle knocking at the door and knew it was for me. It was past ten and Mum was already in bed.

I ran down the stairs and opened the door to find Luca there. The first snow was falling; it was stuck to his fringe and his eyelashes, and his nose and cheeks were red.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked in an urgent whisper, but Mum was already on the landing, leaning over.

‘What’s going on, Olivia?’

‘Nothing,’ I called back over my shoulder. I beckoned Luca inside so that I could shut the door and stop the rest of the heat escaping.

‘Who is it?’

‘Just a friend.’

‘Tell them to go away.’

‘I’m just lending a book.’

I did a little pantomime of opening and closing the door again and shouting, ‘Bye, see you soon!’

Then, stifling the urge to giggle, I put my finger to my lips and Luca tiptoed after me into the kitchen. It was directly below Mum’s room. If she came out, we would hear her and Luca could escape through the back door.

I didn’t put on the kitchen light, but the room wasn’t dark thanks to the luminescence of the snow, which had covered the garden and was mirroring light from the sky and from the windows of the houses in the street and the street-lamps beyond. My feet were cold on the lino. Luca, huge in his coat, pulled me to him and held me tight. I tried to pull away so that I could look into his face, but he wouldn’t let go.

‘What’s the matter?’ I whispered.

‘Don’t go to the party with Marc.’

‘Oh Luca, it’s nothing. I wanted to ask you to take me but you weren’t there and . . .’

Luca, forgetting for a moment the importance of silence, pulled out a chair from under the kitchen table. It screeched. Immediately my mother’s feet swung out of the bed and landed on the other side of the ceiling above us.

Before she could make it to the stairs, I took my coat off the hook and stepped into my wellingtons and we were out, through the back door. We had to climb over two fences and traipse through the back gardens of two neighbours before we reached the alley. Once there we ran, or at least Luca ran and I, hanging on to his gloved hand, struggled to keep up as I scuffed along in the boots which were too big and which didn’t keep out the cold at all.

‘We’ll go to the pub,’ said Luca.

‘I’m in my pyjamas.’

‘Shit, fuck. Well, where can we go?’

I shrugged. I was shivering. ‘Nowhere.’

‘You’re freezing.’

‘That’s what happens when you don’t have a fucking plan,’ I giggled, quoting Sandra at work. ‘Things go tits-up.’

Luca grinned and pulled me close.

‘That’s what I like about you, Liv.’

‘What?’

‘That you’re standing here on Portiston High Street in your pyjamas in the middle of the night in the snow and you still have a mouth like a philosophical sewer.’

‘It’s the only thing keeping me warm.’

‘What about the chip shop?’

‘It would take about two nanoseconds for the news that you and I were there together to get back to Marinella’s.’

I was cold, really cold. The rat’s tails at the ends of my damp hair had actually frozen.

‘Come on,’ said Luca.

He led me back towards Marinella’s and told me to wait a moment around the side, hidden from view by the bins. He ran inside and returned a few minutes later with the key to the van, an armful of blankets, and supplies. The van was parked up a side road, far enough away from the restaurant for nobody to hear it starting up. I climbed up on to the passenger seat and Luca took the wheel, passing his bundle of supplies to me. I kicked off the boots, tucked my icy, bare feet under me and wrapped myself in the blankets. We drove, carefully, to the far end of the seafront and Luca parked the van so that we were looking out to sea. The lights of Seal Island were only just visible through the snow, which landed in black splatches on the windscreen of the van. Luca kept the engine running for warmth, and every few seconds the wipers cleared the screen and visibility was resumed for a moment.