Sorrow and Bliss(34)

He said, ah. ‘Okay, well, I should have apologised.’

I said it was my fault. ‘What were you supposed to say?’

‘I don’t know, but the way I said it. I upset you and I was sorry. I came back to tell you that, a few days later, but you were already in Paris. So, anyway, if it’s not too late, I’m sorry I made you cry.’

I said, ‘It wasn’t you. I thought so, at the time, but it was just Jonathan, I was so humiliated and that’s why I was so rude to you. So I’m sorry as well. And sorry if you smell like fat.’

We both smelled our sleeves. Patrick said wow. ‘Anyway –’ he got out his keys ‘– you probably need to go to sleep.’ He unlocked the car and thanked me for the breakfast he had paid for. It was ten o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘Goodnight Patrick,’ and watched him get in and drive away, standing there by myself, in my bridesmaid’s dress and my uncle’s jacket.





16

PATRICK TEXTED ME. It was still the day after Ingrid’s wedding, the afternoon.

‘Do you like Woody Allen movies?’

‘No. Nobody does.’

‘Do you want to see one with me tonight?’

‘Yes.’

He said he would pick me up at 7.10ish. ‘Do you want to know which one?’

I said, ‘They are all the same one. I will come outside at 7.09ish.’

There was a bar at the cinema. The film started but we never went in. At midnight, a man with a mop said sorry guys.

*

I had just started a job at a small publishing house that specialised in war histories written by the man who owned it. He was old and did not believe in computers or women coming to work in trousers. There were four of us in the office, all women, similar in age and appearance. The only thing he required us to do was bring him a cup of tea at eleven-thirty and shut the door on the way out.

We took turns. Once, on mine, I asked him if I could show him my father’s poems. I said he’d been called a male Sylvia Plath. The owner said, ‘That sounds painful’ and ‘Please don’t let it slam,’ gesturing towards the door.

Spring, then summer and we gave up the pretence of working and began spending our days on the roof, lying in the sun, reading magazines, with our skirts rolled to the tops of our thighs and eventually off altogether, as well as our tops. Patrick’s hospital was visible from up there and such a short distance away that the sound of ambulance sirens carried across the rooftops and the clump of green that was Russell Square.

That is where we saw each other, coincidentally the first time, both of us on our way to the Tube. Then by arrangement, sometimes, then every day. Before work, when the park was empty and the air was still cold, at lunchtime when it was hot and crowded and strewn with rubbish, after work, sitting on a bench until there was no daylight left and no more office workers cutting through the park on their way home and no more tourists standing in their way and the man finished with his rubbish sweeper and it was just us again. Then at some point he would say, ‘I should walk you to the Tube. It’s late and presumably you’ve got to be in at the crack of nine-thirty.’

Sometimes he was late and so sorry although I never minded waiting. Sometimes he was wearing his hospital outfit and his junior doctor trainers, which I made fun of to cover how desperately endearing I found them, with their puffy soles and, I said, jazzy purple bits.

Once, a lunchtime, Patrick put his hand out to take the sandwich I had brought him and we both saw there was something that looked like blood on the inside of his forearm. He apologised and went to a drinking fountain to wash it off and apologised again as he sat down.

I said it must be strange to have a job where people around you are dying. ‘Not of boredom, as in my case. What’s the worst thing about it? The children?’

He said, ‘The mothers.’

I picked up my coffee, embarrassed just then by the intensity of his job, against the stupidity of mine. I said, ‘Anyway, do you want to know the worst things about my job?’

Patrick said he felt like he already knew them all. ‘Unless there are some new ones from today.’

‘Ask me something else then.’

He had been about to eat but put his sandwich back in the box and the box down on the bench. ‘What was the worst thing about Jonathan?’

I covered my mouth because I had just tipped coffee into it and I was shocked, then laughing and unable to swallow. Patrick handed me a serviette and waited for me to answer.

I said the stupid things first: his wet-looking hair, the way he dressed. That he never waited until I was out of the car before he started walking away, that he wasn’t sure what his cleaning lady’s name was even though she had worked for him for seven years. I told him about the room in Jonathan’s apartment that had nothing in it except a drum kit that faced a mirrored wall. And then I took the lid off my cup and said, the worst thing is that I thought he was funny because he made everything sound like a joke. ‘But he meant everything he said, at the time. Then he would change his mind and mean the opposite, as absolutely. He said I was beautiful and clever, then insane and I believed all of it.’ I stared into my cup. I wished I had stopped at the mirrored wall.

Patrick rubbed underneath his chin. ‘Probably, the worst thing to me was the tan.’

I laughed and looked at him smiling at me and then not as much when he said, ‘And being there when he proposed to you.’ A feeling, like fizzing, moved up the back of my neck. ‘Seeing you say yes and not being able to stop it.’ The fizzing spread out, across my shoulders, down my arms, upwards into my hair.