Exciting Times(52)

I acknowledged this was a benefit not to be discounted.

*

Mam said Granaunt Maggie needed a hip replacement. Again, Mam said. Maggie had a turbulent relationship with prosthetics. The first fake hip had damaged some of the remaining portion of Maggie’s actual pelvis, so now she was getting another, and probably suing. You never knew with the solicitors.

I said my friend Edith did law, albeit in another jurisdiction, and offered to ask her about it. Mam said she sounded like a nice girl.

‘This other friend of mine is having a hard time,’ I said. ‘His dad’s just out of hospital.’

It felt indiscreet to say the friend was the banker.

‘The poor lad,’ said Mam. This was likely the first time anyone had ever referred to Julian as a ‘lad’. ‘Would it be serious?’

‘He’s grand now. He had a heart attack, but he’s in remission.’

‘God love him.’

‘Both of them,’ I said.

‘Sure look.’

Mam’s dad died when I was six. Like any number of men in our family, he’d been an alcoholic. You had to be careful of that, Mam said. I couldn’t tell if she meant men should be careful of drink or we should be careful of them. The funeral was in the big white turf-smelling house in Roscommon. I’d gone back twice a year since to see Nana, who lasted eight years more. George and Tom watched telly with her and I’d go to the sink to wash up. ‘You’re as good,’ Nana said. ‘Bit of initiative.’ At college I had tentatively described this as an example of patriarchal conditioning, but in fact I’d felt superior doing jobs while the boys sat there like spuds.

I asked Mam what to do about Julian.

‘You’re as well not prying,’ Mam said. ‘Just be there for him.’

She put me on to Dad. He said: ‘Grand stretch in the evenings now?’, and I said there was. He said it was well for some.

‘It is,’ I said.

I felt important because now I was the one who couldn’t see Edith. She messaged asking to hang out, and I said I was busy. I meant that I wanted to be there for Julian when he got home, but I obviously couldn’t tell her that. So she probably thought I was dynamic and sought-after in ways I was too busy to even explain to her. That, or she thought I needed to manage my time better.

*

After Miles had been in hospital for a week, Julian took me to the Marriott in Admiralty. It was the first time we’d been out together properly since his return earlier in September. In the elevator a mink-coated woman scanned his height as though unsure he needed so much of it, then my hemline in certainty that a great deal more was required.

He let me order for both of us and said, distractedly, that my hair looked quite nice. We discussed whether the word ‘quite’ magnified or diminished a compliment. I sketched a cline on a napkin and put ‘quite’ between ‘a little’ and ‘very’. It was nice being someone else’s Edith. Julian drew his own and put it between ‘very’ and ‘extremely’ – in this context, he said. In others, I was quite right. I asked which ‘quite’ he’d used just there and he said he wondered how he’d managed to miss me in London.

‘I missed you, too,’ I said.

He said I’d been a good friend to him.

‘I want to be now,’ I said.

The seats were upholstered in a range of fabrics, overlooked by paintings of cliffs. The women in the restaurant wore bright dresses as though to atone for the glum-suited men – we had to have him along, you see. Julian and I started inventing stories for the ones nearby. He took as married a couple I regarded as quite obviously having a secret liaison.

‘At the Marriott?’ Julian said.

I said: ‘Sorry, I forgot everyone occupies a social realm where they’re bound to see someone they know at a five-star hotel.’

I felt calm in a way I never had before he’d left. I had Edith to go on real dates with now, so I didn’t need to worry about whether Julian and I were on one. We could just eat.

He told me London had changed: not for everyone, of course, but for him. Nothing but the Shard was tall anymore. The Tube was shabbier than before. At least in both countries the woman in the announcements was equally anxious that he please make way for alighting passengers. He wondered if she minded hearing her voice in stations. There was no amount of money he would accept to have his own broadcast to him when he was trying not to spill coffee on himself. He’d thought he didn’t notice the Chinese characters everywhere in Hong Kong, but found in London that the signs looked bare without them, though his Chinese reading comprehension was still, he said, below that of literally a toddler. And he took the opposite view to Middle England’s, re: London: he was freaked out by how many white people there were.

‘Keep a wide berth of Oxford, so,’ I said.

Afterwards, we took the tram from Admiralty to Pottinger Street, then the outdoor escalator. Signs, as always: Sunny Palms Sauna, Paris Hair Salon, Open Late SEX TOY SHOP (emphasis theirs). It seemed humorous that Julian could be standing to the right, looking like the rest of us, when we had stayed while he was gone.

I realised I walked ahead of him now. The first time he took me to lunch, he’d reached the MTR station escalator first, then let me go ahead so – I soon saw – the height difference wouldn’t be magnified on the steps. It had made me nervous. If he thought of things like that, I’d wondered what other observations he’d make. Now twenty-three was shaping up to be the first year of my life where the idea of someone noticing me didn’t fill me with abject horror. I supposed later was better than never.