The Love of My Life(19)

He drives off, turning left down Frognal Rise.

I wait for a long time, but he doesn’t return.

I remember the man outside my work at Plymouth. Same build, same baseball cap low over his face. Fear worms in my chest.

Is it the same person?

I scroll through my mental Rolodex of the men who’ve messaged me lately on Facebook, but it’s been several days since I looked at my inbox and besides, none of them use real photos.

After a long wait, I leave the alleyway and run towards the house, heart in my mouth.

As I reach the gate, I see something yellow lashed to next door’s front gate. Something angular, fixed – I stop in the middle of the street. It’s a For Sale sign.

Of course. They told us last month they were putting their house on the market.

I allow myself to smile. The man was just looking at a house he’d seen online. Nothing more. There are many millions of baseball-cap-wearing men in the world. The weirdo in Plymouth, hundreds of miles away, has nothing to do with this man – this perfectly innocent man, who could quite feasibly end up being my new neighbour.

I slide my phone back into my bag and stand at the bottom of the steps up to our miniature front garden, waiting for my breathing to slow down. There’ll probably be a stream of people coming to stare at the house in the coming days, before viewings begin. I’d better get used to it.

Then it comes to me, suddenly – perhaps because I’m already primed for threat, perhaps because it’s so unusual – that our dining room light is on too, along with all the others. Leo’s been in there.

My heart starts racing again. Why?

Because he needed to find something of his.

Because Ruby went in there before bed.

For any one of a million reasons, none of which involve him climbing across stacks of Granny’s stuff to find the papers I hid last week, which he couldn’t possibly know were missing because he doesn’t even know they exist.

But I must get them out of there, I realise now. Out of the house. I should never have kept them under our roof in the first place: even with my cupboard locked, it was never worth the risk.

I’m going to have to do something about this whole hoarding business. I think Leo’s right.

Tomorrow morning, before Leo and Ruby come down, I’ll put it all in my bag and take it to work. I’ll lock it in my drawer until I can bring myself to throw it all out, which I should have done years ago. Those stupid things, those testaments to the final moments of my old life: they could destroy everything I hold dear now. What was the point?

As I open the front door I can hear Leo talking to Ruby, who’s recently started arriving downstairs at ten o’clock, claiming she’s been awake since bedtime. (She never has.) I imagine my little girl right now, pink-cheeked with the sleep she claims not to have had, negotiating hard with her beloved daddy.

Ruby is at the centre of my universe. I’d die for her, immediately, and without quibble – but that makes no difference, I realise, in the context of where I’ve been this evening. Of the papers hidden deep in the expanse of my grandmother’s haphazard archives.

He’s still there. He will always be there, and there will never be any resolution, for me, because he is the love of my life.

The love of my other life, I remind myself, tiredly, but that refrain is losing power now, and my heart knows it.





Chapter Ten


LEO


Emma was sitting across the aisle at her grandmother’s funeral in Falmouth, the first time I saw her. I remember her voice hitting all the wrong notes during the congregational hymns and her not seeming to care; her laughter as she recounted her grandmother’s predilection for handsome young men. She had short, curly hair that she tucked behind her ears, and a yellow felt coat, and in that church full of winter black she was like a bright torch.

After they buried Gloria, Emma broke off to watch the gig boats racing across the Fal estuary. There was a strong north-easterly wind, scrambling in over the hills behind St Mawes, and she looked straight into it as it caught her hair and gusted it up and away from her face. I thought about the yellow coat that Jess, my ex-girlfriend, had bought once, wanting to spice up her wardrobe, and how it had never really worked. I remembered the night she asked me if I still loved her and I said yes and then woke her up at 1 a.m. to say, actually, I’m so sorry, but I don’t.

I watched this woman, on whom a yellow coat looked perfect, and hoped she wasn’t smiling about a lover.

Then I felt bad, because this was her grandmother’s funeral.

*

The problem was, I’d fallen for Emma before even seeing her in the flesh.

I can cover any kind of obituary, but my specialty is politicians. This is largely because I spent a while on the politics desk before moving to obits, so it was assumed that my Westminster knowledge was heavy-duty. (It’s adequate.)

It was actually an undertaker who alerted us to Gloria Bigelow’s death, which tends only to happen when the deceased doesn’t have much by way of a family. I’d heard of her, a rare female MP in 1950s London, fond of backbench tirades, but she’d been absent from political life so long that nobody had thought to write an advance obit.

I’d called Gloria’s granddaughter, Emma, to ask for a few details. We spoke for more than two hours. By the end of the phone call, I was intoxicated.

She invited me to the funeral, which, again, is not something that happens often – and something we invariably decline when it does, especially if the funeral in question is all the way down in bloody Cornwall – but I said yes, because I had to meet her. I even went to Soho at 9 p.m. to get a haircut at one of those cheap late-night barbers.