Just Last Night(17)

My nervous smile felt like a jagged line on a polygraph as I took a shaky drag on my Vogue Superslim Menthol. (I was trying out being a smoker for six months, until I got a cough and decided I had lung cancer. Susie banned me from then on. “You like to think you’re the risk-taking sort but you’re not, Eve. You like the uniform but not the hours.”)

“Yeah, didn’t he say to you too? Hester. There’s something so very Ed about going off and obtaining a future wife as an undergrad, isn’t there. It was written. It was bound to be. Like him ending up president of all the societies.”

Hester. Hester? I was speechless, I couldn’t respond. The casual cruelty had disemboweled me. Ed had my heart, and he’d behaved like Hannibal Lecter with it.

My mum liked to tell me I had no idea what bastards men could be—I thought my dad abruptly emigrating upon divorce had made it pretty clear, but apparently my mum thought being on the daughter rather than wife end of that decision made it less hurtful.

Right now, I felt the full force of that maternal threat, made good.

That someone as gentle, known to me, and, I thought, sincere as Ed Cooper could do this? It was unfathomable. It was savage.

“Ah, there they are, our common-law husbands!” Susie said, as Ed and Justin lad-swaggered toward us, through the Friday night throng. Yeah, my bigamous common-law husband.

Ed could barely meet my eyes, even as we hugged hello, somehow managing not to make any bodily contact. He radiated pure culpability.

“It’s brass bollocks out here,” Justin said, blowing on his hands. “Never mind you two’s filthy habit, we’re going inside.” (He started smoking a month later, following the law that anything Justin claims to be censorious about, he is usually thinking of doing.)

“Eduardo, how can you have coupled up this fast?!” Susie said, not missing a beat, once we had drinks. Ed mumbled indistinct, G-rated things about having lots of tutorials together and I stared furiously at the rosy phantom of lipstick mark that wasn’t mine on the side of my glass.

“And you’re going down to Cornwall to spend Christmas with her family?!” Wow. Ed had sure kept me carefully out of the loop.

“Dum dum dum da-da-dum,” Justin hummed Queen’s “Under Pressure.”

I had a hard lump in my throat, and rocks in my stomach.

“Her older sister’s really sick with encephalitis and her parents are up at the hospital all the time. I said I’d cook Christmas lunch for them.”

Oh, how Ed. How wonderful of you.

“It’s touch and go whether she’ll make a full recovery, apparently,” Ed said.

He risked looking directly at me, possibly hoping I’d see this was a good and necessary endeavor. I nearly spat: She could have seven sick sisters and you’d still be a lying arsehole traitor.

“Do you have a photo? Let’s see her! I can’t even picture this otherworldly femme fatale who’s got you settled down this fast,” Susie said.

Susie had no idea how she was ratcheting up my agony as surely as if she was tightening the screws on a rack. I took some small, sour comfort in the fact that Ed was also clearly wishing a whirling portal to another dimension would open up outside, by the bar’s happy hour specials A-board.

He reluctantly flashed a wallet Polaroid at us, and I glanced, blank expression, at a blob of pale golden light, a blob that still somehow contrived to have phenomenal bone structure and a sexy broad mouth. She was beautiful, and she looked nothing like me. Of course. Satan wasn’t pulling a half shift.

“A Marilyn who’s going to be Ed’s Jackie,” Justin said and Ed replied, “Hah, steady on,” and Susie said, “I bet that’s true, I bet you marry her,” and I couldn’t find a single thing to say.

I wanted to howl-weep, I wanted to scream, I wanted to slap Ed—a stinging, full-palm slap like scorned ladies used to deliver in old movies, and the man holds his face and blinks. Instead I went to the loo, when enough time had passed that it looked innocuous, and did a humiliating mini vomit.

It took an hour for Susie to go to the loo in turn, at the same moment that Justin was at the bar, and Ed and I were finally alone.

There was an excruciating moment when Ed glanced at me and tried to speak and couldn’t, opening and closing his mouth. I had anesthetized with cheap white wine, which had first helped numb my throat and kept me quiet. Now I felt it unlocking my words, unguardedly.

“You could’ve told me,” I said, when it was clear Ed was going to waste at least half of the precious minute we had for his limp explanation in mute terror.

“Why did you write?” I said, hollow, and blunt. “You could’ve not written to me. ‘I love you’ and then this?”

“You didn’t write back?” Ed said, guilty head snapping up in surprise, jaw dropping. “I said if you didn’t write back, I’d know you didn’t . . . want . . . ?”

“What?” I said. “I did write back?”

We stared at each other, uncomprehending. That this had broken my heart was a given. That it could be due to an admin fuck-up, rather than pure evil, was a new room in this hell that I’d not contemplated existing.

“I didn’t get it,” Ed said, shaking his head, face stricken. “Eve. You have to believe me, I didn’t. I wouldn’t . . .” He trailed off.