Sorrow and Bliss(28)

‘One year, after I saw you at your aunt and uncle’s, at Christmas.’ He said I probably didn’t remember it. ‘We were teenagers. You were sick and I had to come in to –’

‘You told me about your mother.’

Patrick looked overly surprised, as though he did not think any conversation we’d ever had would be memorable to me.

‘Why did that make you think you were in love with me?’

‘I think, just because you asked me about her. No one else had or has really, if you don’t count Rowland wanting to know how she died, the first time I came.’

I shivered and folded my arms, although the air coming from outside wasn’t cold. ‘We are awful, Patrick.’

He said, ‘You weren’t. You’re not. Anyway the point is, I did think I was in love with you then and apparently told Oliver, which is a shame.’ Patrick scratched the back of his head very briskly. ‘But I obviously wasn’t and figured it out eventually. So please don’t worry, I have never loved you.’ He heard himself and said, ‘Sorry, that sounds –’

‘It’s fine.’ I told him I shouldn’t have asked him in the first place. ‘You can go.’

‘Are you alright though?’

I said yes, sharply. ‘I’m fine Patrick. It’s just been a full day of men who loved me once then stopped or thought they were in love with me, then realised they were just hungry or something.’ I stepped back into the house, telling Patrick that I would see him later.

*

Instead of sleeping, I lay awake until morning, my mind shifting between the memory of Jonathan behind his desk, his smirk as he told me I shouldn’t be a mother, and Patrick on the footpath and returning to the door. Jonathan was savage but at least in breaking my heart he’d kept it quick and dirty. In explaining that he’d never loved me – not actually, only in a moment of youthful confusion – Patrick had been so concerned not to hurt me, it was like having the dressing removed from a wound, peeled away from the corner too slowly, with such excessive care that before the wet flesh is halfway exposed you want to rip it off yourself.

It was during those hours, when I had thought about both of them, that Jonathan and Patrick became connected in my mind. And it was because they had both rejected me, on the same day, that afterwards, whenever I thought about Jonathan and my failed marriage, I thought about Patrick as well. That is what I decided in the following days and that is what I believed for a while.





12

NICHOLAS CAME INTO the kitchen the next morning while my father and I were sitting at the table reading newspapers. He wanted to know if there were any spare boxes in the house because he had decided to move in with Oliver. He wanted to be nearer the city. He wanted to try and get a proper job. He said his brother was coming to get him that afternoon.

My father got up and said he’d see what he could rustle up. Nicholas made toast and brought it over, sitting in an opposite chair. He began to talk about his plans. I brought my elbow onto the table and continued reading with my hand across my forehead, holding the weight of my head and shielding my face at the same time.

I did not respond to anything he said. I felt like a school child trying to hide the fact they are crying at their desk because the worksheet in front of them is too hard. I was trying not to cry because the prospect in front of me, of Nicholas leaving and it all of a sudden becoming just me and my parents in the house, was too hard. As he continued, I tried to concentrate solely on the fact that his going meant Patrick would stop coming over.

After a few minutes, he gave up and dragged my father’s paper towards him, turning each page without pausing to read anything. I sat motionless in front of mine, reading everything on the spread open in front of me until there was nothing left except the Court Circular. The previous day Princess Anne had opened a customer service centre at the Selby District Council and attended a reception afterwards. I felt sorry for her and worse for myself, especially once Nicholas stood up, put his plate in the sink and said he should probably crack on.

Eventually, I left the house and went for a walk. As I was trying to find my way out of Holland Park, my phone rang. It was Peregrine. My apology letter and his reply had been our only contact. I was not brave enough to initiate a lunch, in spite of my missing him, more than seemed reasonable.

Now, he said, he was in a car heading generally westward and wanted to know exactly where I was. He had just found out – he said never mind from whom – that my marriage had flopped and while he did not need to ask who was at fault, he felt desperate that I hadn’t rung him up when it happened.

I told him I was in Holland Park, and Peregrine said how convenient. He would divert his driver. ‘You can scurry up and meet me at the Orangery in quarter of an hour.’

I told him I was wearing jeans. He disapproved of denim in any incarnation, on any occasion, and I hoped the fact would get me out of going. I wanted to see him but not as I was.

I heard him give some instruction to his driver and then, coming back, Peregrine said he would overlook it since sartorial standards were always the first thing to go after heartbreak.

*

In lieu of hello, Peregrine said, ‘I have never understood why people think of champagne as celebratory rather than medicinal.’ A waitress was pouring it, clearly to his mind the wrong way and as she moved to fill the second glass, he thanked her and said that we could manage things from here. I sat down and he put a glass in my hand. ‘Surely the only time one needs one’s blood effervesced is when life is utterly flat.’