That was the beginning of it, the most exciting part probably. Soon, her audience began to expand rapidly. At the request of her online followers, she started recording her own cookery videos. She accepted sponsorship from a high-end kitchenware company, who filled our flat with cast-iron pans and pastel ramekins and more utensils than two people could ever possibly need. She was offered a regular column in a newspaper. But at first it was just us, flicking through the free magazines to find the latest new places to visit.
I think you can tell a lot about a relationship by the way two people dine together in public. Marnie and I loved to watch as couples entered hand in hand; groups of men in tailored suits grew louder and louder, expanding to fill the available space; the illicit affair; the anniversary meal; the very first date. We liked to read the room, to guess the pasts and predict the futures of the other patrons, telling stories of their lives that we hoped might be true.
If you had been one of those other customers, sitting at one of those other tables, playing that same game and watching us instead, you would have seen two young women, one tall and fair, one shrunken and dark, entirely comfortable in one another’s company. I think you might have known that we enjoyed a friendship with strong branches and coiled roots. You would have seen Marnie – without thinking, without asking, without needing to – reach over to take the tomatoes from my plate. You might have seen me, in response, take the slithers of pickle or slices of cucumber from hers.
But Marnie and I haven’t dined alone in three years, not since she moved in with Charles. We are never so at ease now as we were back then. Our worlds are no longer entwined. I am now an intermittent guest in the story of her life. Our friendship is no longer its own independent thing, but a skin tag, a protrusion that subsists within another love.
I did not think then – and I do not think now – that Marnie and Charles had a love greater than ours. And yet I understood implicitly that their love – a romantic love – would and must subsume ours. Even though our love – one that flourished strolling shoulder to shoulder down school corridors, on coaches to day-trip destinations, on sleepovers – seemed so much more deserving of a lifetime together.
Every Friday, at around eleven in the evening when I left their flat, I found myself saying goodbye to a love that had shaped me, defined me, decided me. It always felt so cruel to be both within it and without it all at once.
And a truth that I knew then – and one that I still cannot fully comprehend – is that, crueller still, it was a situation entirely of my own making. I am wholly responsible for that first detached limb, for that first broken bone, for that first forgotten memory.
Chapter Three
Three months after I met Jonathan, I moved to live with him in his maisonette in Islington. We were young, yes, but we were completely, utterly, entirely in love. It was unexpectedly easy, in a way that something new rarely is. It was lively and exciting, in a way that my simple life rarely was. I had loved living with Marnie – I had been happy – and yet eventually I began to crave something more, something other.
I had spent most of my childhood in a home that seemed loving from the outside but consistently failed to deliver on that promise. My parents were twenty-five years married before they divorced. But they should have separated much sooner, because their squabbling and bickering made our family home intolerable.
The short version is that my father was a philanderer. He had a twenty-year affair with his secretary, and there were many other women who danced in and out of his affections over the course of my parents’ marriage. My sister was four years younger, and so I did what I could to protect her from the noise and the drama and the tension. I took her out and turned the music up and was forever distracting her with promises of something interesting somewhere else. But I suppose that’s another story for another time. What I mean to say is that I – perhaps more than most – was susceptible to the ideals of a romantic love. I adored Marnie. But this new love consumed me completely.
Jonathan and I met on Oxford Street when we were both twenty-two years old. It was six in the evening and we were heading to our respective homes at opposite poles of the city. The station entrances were gated, as they so often are, due to overcrowding on the platforms. The sky was dark, threatening rain, and thick, grey clouds passed quickly over our heads.
Jonathan and I – unbeknownst to one another – were both enmeshed in the crowd queuing to enter the ticket hall. The throng felt like its own person, with its own consciousness, an impatient desire to be anywhere else emanating from us as one. I could feel other bodies invading my own: arms squeezed against mine, thigh on thigh in a way that seemed far too familiar, someone’s chest forced against the back of my head. We were pressed together so tightly that I couldn’t see beyond the back of the man standing in front of me.
Eventually there was a clanging, metal on metal, somewhere up ahead as the gates were opened from the inside. The crowd began to vibrate, readying themselves. The man in front of me – blocking my view – leant forwards and then, as I stepped into his empty space, he staggered back. He bumped into me and I into the person behind. The two sides of the crowd shuffled forwards steadily as we, there in the centre, sent a surge, a rolling wave, pushing the middle in the wrong direction.
‘What the … ?’ I said, regaining my balance.
‘You …’ he said, turning to face me.
I knew. As I had with Marnie. Immediately, I knew. It sounds so stupid, so naïve, I know. People have levied that criticism against me hundreds of times – when I moved in with him, when I agreed to marry him, even on the eve of our wedding. And all I could say in response to them then and all I can say to you now is that I hope that one day you know too.
I suppose that it was different with Marnie. We were both looking for someone. The next seven years at that school were stretching out in front of us and neither one of us wanted to live that alone. The joy we felt at finding one another was heightened by an overwhelming sense of relief.
Whereas with Jonathan … I don’t know. I had never felt like the sort of woman who would fall in love in that way. And so there was no want, no empty space, no something that needed substantiating. I simply saw him and I knew instinctively that I needed to know him better. I could tell you how it felt with words that over the decades have become synonymous with great love, but those truisms were never true for me. The world didn’t fall away beneath my feet; instead I felt solid and substantial in a way that I never had before. There were no trembling hands, no quivering hearts, no faces flushed with pink. There were no butterflies. There was simply the sense that he felt, for me, like the home I’d always needed but never really known.
‘You …’ I said, straightening the lapels of my coat. His eyes were olive green, and as he stared at me, bewildered, I felt this inappropriate urge to lift my palm to his cheek. ‘You just—’
‘My scarf,’ he said, gesturing towards the floor. ‘You stood on my scarf.’
‘I did no such—’ I looked down. I was still standing on the tassels of his navy scarf. ‘Oh,’ I said, quickly stepping aside. ‘Sorry.’
‘You want to fucking get on with it,’ came a voice from behind us, loud and gruff, the voice of the crowd.