Girl A(66)

He set down new drinks. We touched glasses. ‘Tell me about New York,’ he said.

I had been select in my reports to colleagues, and even to Olivia and Christopher. But JP really did want to hear about New York. I told him about my runs in Battery Park, which had to be early: everybody got to work so fucking early in New York. I had my own office overlooking the Statue of Liberty – ‘So, you really are a big deal,’ said JP – and my favourite places for coffee; ramen; books; tacos; pastrami. The New York bar exams had been easier than I expected. I spent many weekends in Long Island, where Devlin owned a house. On certain summer evenings, a rich bronze light extended from the horizon across the ocean and the sky, and landed on the long metal table in Devlin’s kitchen, where we worked. ‘It’s the champagne light,’ Devlin would say, and would pad to her cellar to fetch a bottle. Sometimes, if it had been a long week and the champagne light was tenuous, Devlin determined that it would soon be on its way, and visited the cellar early.

‘Do you have many friends out there?’

‘Not many,’ I said. ‘Some people from the office, I guess.’

I thought of the early weekends, when my voice would catch in my throat on a Monday morning, after two days of disuse. I thought of recent weekends. There is a boutique hotel, I thought, in Midtown. I know the smell of the rugs. I know where to kneel, if they want to watch us in the mirror. I meet friends, there.

‘Devlin and I drink together,’ I said. ‘And I have an elderly flatmate called Edna.’

‘Edna?’

‘She’s good company.’

‘Oh, Lex.’ He grinned, but it fell fast. ‘We were going to go there,’ he said. ‘Weren’t we? Just before—’

‘The hotel was booked. But we got our deposit back, I guess.’

I remembered us at the table in our flat, laptops up, sharing Lonely Planet. He planned a precise route for our days. Williamsburg; Harlem; Beacon, on the Hudson. Places we had planned to see together, which I had ended up liking alone.

‘Perhaps we’ll visit you someday,’ he said. The sting of the plural.

He cleared his throat.

‘I have to tell you,’ he said. ‘Something—’

He loosened his tie further from his neck. I dipped my head, craning for his eyes, but he looked to the bar. The lamps around us had been extinguished as each table departed, and it was very dark.

‘I’ve got some news,’ he said, ‘that I didn’t want to tell you on the phone. But I know that you’ll be back in New York any minute, and I suppose it may be – it may be some time before we see one another again.’

Even drunk, I was practised at impassivity. I steadied my gaze and waited.

‘Eleanor and I are going to have a baby,’ he said. ‘I’ll be honest with you in that it wasn’t necessarily planned – I think that we both might have liked to marry first – but she was excited about it, and we’re lucky enough to be in a position where we can manage it, we think. Although I suppose that you don’t know, do you, until it arrives—’

I had watched videos of filibusters in the Senate – I liked the sheer bloody-mindedness of the concept – and I wondered if that was what JP was attempting; maybe, with the drinks and his dread, he would be able to make it through until morning.

‘So, you see,’ he concluded. ‘I hope that you understand.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Of course I do.’

I hauled up my smile.

‘It’s wonderful news,’ I said. ‘But I wish that you had told me at the beginning. It might be too late for a toast, now.’

He looked bemused. He looked, I decided, disappointed.

‘So,’ I said, ‘when will the baby come?’

‘In two more months.’

‘Jesus. You should be at home, preparing. All you’ll get here is wine and debate.’

In the middle of the table, he reached for my hands and entwined them with his own. I looked at his wrinkled palms and the mounds of veins and the hair between his knuckles, and I thought of the many, varied times when I had taken one of these hands in mine. On aeroplanes and after dinners, in my college room the day after we met, walking into a restaurant or into a party, and in the taxis which we sometimes shared on our way home. I held his hand when it was too hot to embrace at night, and to guide him to the right place – just there – between my legs. When we were outside in wintertime, he enveloped my fist in his palm to keep it warm. His child would have improbably minute hands, barely big enough to clutch a finger.

‘Why are you so sad, JP?’ I said. ‘Why are you so sad, when you got everything you ever wanted?’

We finished our drinks, and he walked me across the two streets to the Romilly Townhouse. There was nothing left to say, and we both produced our work phones, and began to scroll through the messages we had missed. Devlin had been in touch: our client was comfortable with the commercial terms for the purchase of ChromoClick, and it would be bought within the fortnight. Full steam ahead! said Devlin. We had been drinking for some time, and I didn’t trust that I could respond with the alacrity her message required.

At the entrance to the hotel, JP opened his arms. ‘It was great to see you,’ he said, and at the same time I said, ‘Congratulations again.’