‘I’m moving out,’ I said to Marnie when I returned that evening.
‘Oh, right?’ she said, distracted. She was sitting on our blue and white sofa, her slippered feet on the coffee table, drumming her fingers against the keys of her new laptop. She had recorded her first video the previous evening: her recipe for carbonara, which had always been my favourite. ‘This is just impossible,’ she said. ‘How do I … ?’ She picked up her phone and began stabbing her thumbs furiously into the screen.
‘With Jonathan,’ I said.
‘When’s that?’ she replied.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said.
She looked up. ‘What?’ Her forehead was creased with confusion. ‘Tomorrow? But you’ve only just met him.’
‘It’s been three months,’ I replied.
‘But that’s nothing!’
I shrugged. ‘It’s something to me.’
‘Oh,’ she said quietly. ‘And you’re sure?’ She closed the screen of her laptop. ‘It has to be tomorrow?’
I nodded.
It would be easy to look back now and judge myself for moving too fast, for being too eager, but the truth is that I wouldn’t change a thing.
She helped me to pack my bags and she gave me a set of sharp knives, a casserole dish the size of a cauldron, and a red dinnerware set. ‘Because you’re going to have to learn to cook,’ she said. ‘You can’t live off beans and toast.’
‘I’ll be back at mealtimes,’ I joked.
‘I hope you will,’ she said. ‘I’ll have no one to cook for without you here.’
I wondered at the time if she was indulging me, if she thought I’d return in a couple of weeks. But I don’t know now that she was. I think she understood that this was my next step, the start of something new.
I watched as she wrapped an old Evening Standard around a set of red ramekins that I knew I’d never use. She set them down on the side and sighed. ‘You’re sure about this?’ she asked. ‘Because you know I think he’s great, and I promise I’m asking this for you and not for me, but this is quick, and are you sure, are you definitely sure?’
‘I am,’ I said, and I was.
‘I’ll miss you,’ she said.
‘I know,’ I replied. ‘Me, too.’
A bubble of tears rose in my throat as I thought of all the things I’d miss: her brightly coloured socks drying on the radiator, cling-filmed leftovers waiting for me in the fridge, smiley faces drawn in the mist on the bathroom mirror. I swallowed it and I smiled, and she took my hands in hers and squeezed them tightly.
The first weeks felt a little frantic as I tried to be everything to both of them. I didn’t want Marnie to feel that I loved her any less – because I didn’t – and yet I so wanted Jonathan to know that I was his completely. When Marnie’s grandmother died, just a few weeks later, she called me in tears in the middle of the night. I got dressed and fumbled my way on to the street and into a taxi, and I was at the old flat in less than thirty minutes. I think, after that, she knew that she only ever had to ask, that I’d always be there, just as I’d always been before.
Marnie and Jonathan became good friends. She had never been taught to cycle as a child, and he took it upon himself to show her how. He gave her one of his old bikes and she liked that it was built for a man. She taught him how to cook carbonara. She had tried to teach me, she said, but it was too thankless a task, and so she was going to share her culinary secrets with him instead.
We worked perfectly as a trio. Jonathan had so many hobbies – cycling and camping and climbing – and I had only Marnie. So when he spent the weekend in the countryside in a tent that flapped in the wind with spiders in his sleeping bag and shoes damp from the rain, I stayed in the old flat, cosy and warm with my very best friend. Those few years were the greatest of my life. It was such a joy to discover that I was worthy – and capable, too – of two great loves.
When Jonathan died, I thought that our friendship would snap back into the thing that it had been before. It didn’t quite. I don’t know if it was his absence, but everything in my life felt emptier.
I missed so many things while I was with him. I didn’t see a cloud for over two years; I was always blinded by blue. I found joy in stupid places: in children walking slowly, and dogs barking in the park, and the light of the moon through my blinds late at night. I thought that his eyes were green like an olive. And yet I haven’t found an olive as beautiful since. Each laugh is hard won. Each smile is fleeting. Every ache feels eternal. My ability to take the good and the bad of this world and to balance them has disappeared completely. I am uncalibrated.
I thought that I would find myself again with Marnie. I thought that I could reset myself. But things had moved on while I’d been looking elsewhere.
Chapter Five
Stanley and I were silent as the lift descended to the lobby. We were silent as we exited through the front doors of Marnie and Charles’s building. We were silent as we walked down the pebbled pathway that led to the public pavement. We were side by side and yet I felt very much alone.
‘That was nice, wasn’t it?’ said Stanley eventually. He secured the buttons on his coat and lifted the collar up towards his ears. ‘Did you have a good evening?’
I looped my scarf around my neck a second time. It was September and I tend to think that September is still summer but it never is. It is always a little sharper, a little cooler, despite the bright evenings.
I didn’t answer the question. ‘What do you think of Charles?’ I asked instead.
Charles had regaled the table with the story of his and Marnie’s first meeting. It had been in a bar in the city. He had sent Marnie and her colleagues bottle after bottle of champagne until finally she acquiesced and joined him at his table. He thought it showed the strength of his love. She thought it demonstrated charm and commitment. I thought it made him seem desperate.
‘Great guy, right?’ Stanley replied, turning towards me and grinning. ‘Really great guy.’
I didn’t look at him; I stared forwards and down the road ahead. I always hoped that one day I would ask that question and someone would turn to me and smile and say instead, ‘Absolute wanker, right?’
Because that was entirely true of the man that I knew. He was simply unbearable.
‘But do you really think that, Jane?’ Charles would say to me, whenever I expressed an opinion that in any way contradicted his own. ‘Because I really think that we’re on the same page here,’ he would continue, ‘and what you meant to say was …’
And then he’d launch into a lecture on the housing crisis, or understaffing in hospitals, or the economics of inheritance tax, as though he was an authority on the subject. And then later, when we had nearly moved on, when the conversation was almost forgotten, he would say, ‘I’m really glad we’re in agreement on that, Jane.’ Even though my position hadn’t been altered at all but simply silenced by his volume and his posturing and his overweening confidence.
He would tap twice and in quick succession on the thin rim of his wine glass when it wanted refilling, but only when the bottle was at my end of the table, because I was seemingly unworthy of actual words. He would sometimes pick up my hand and unfurl my fingers and say, ‘You should really stop biting these, Jane.’ And then later, towards the end of the evening, when everyone’s eyes were shot with blood and alcohol and slipping shut with tiredness, he would say these things, vulgar things – always aimed elsewhere but always for me – like ‘Probably time for you to be getting Jane home, isn’t it?’ and then he’d wink and say, ‘If you get my drift. Do you get my drift?’ And we all did, and so we smiled and laughed. And yet every time something would sink lower within me. Because I hadn’t slept with anyone in three years, not since Jonathan, and the thought of another man’s hands on my skin made me bristle and wince.