Just Last Night(54)

“Take a seat. Beer?”

“Yes, cheers.”

I go to the fridge, pour myself a large Sauvignon, then crack the ring pull on a can of Staropramen and hand it to him.

There’s no appetite for small talk and Ed, always one to read a room, says, businesslike: “Firstly, I’ve been wanting to say for ages, sorry for Hester being a dickhead at the wake. She’s pretty mortified at what was said. There’s no hard feelings. Or, not from her end.”

“I can’t believe she admitted she was out of order.”

I’m not going to be overtly rude about Hester to her fiancé, but equally, I’m not going to be so scrupulous about hiding my opinion of her behavior, from now on. Some truth has broken through. It can be the new normal.

“Yes, she has,” Ed says, with a forehead-creasing, hard frown that makes me think he came out of his corner fighting, once they were home.

“She was wasted”—she wasn’t, I think, but whatever works—“. . . and she’s got so consumed with the wedding. When I pointed out she was blithely talking about Susie being replaced, to her best friend, she got it.”

“Ah, OK.”

I think I see how the trick was worked. Ed, the man who could broker any peace. Don’t you see how devastated Eve will be not to have Susie by her side that day? Swinging the spotlight back to Hester, the sun that we planets revolve around.

What’s the betting his version also made Hester think I’d see the error of my ways and be shamefaced at insulting her, once sober? A truce where we both think the other surrendered.

Ed clears his throat. “As to the other . . .”

I sip my wine, look at him levelly. He sets his can down and pushes forward, hands on knees.

“I’m so sorry you found out about this when you did, Eve. Believe me. That day was hard enough without that on top. I can’t imagine how difficult it was.”

The empathy card. Or is he implying this is only sordid because Susie’s gone?

“When you keep secrets, you never know when they’re going to come out, I guess,” I say.

My voice sounds tight.

“I’d almost forgotten it’d happened, you know. We’d dug deep to bury it.”

“Sounds like you’re pretty rubbish in bed, then,” I say. “Most of us would have a memory of banging one of our best mates.”

Ed flinches.

Yes, bad luck. I’m not going to play along with any I tripped up, fell on her, I’m so haplessly clumsy that penetration occurred, memory very fuzzy minimization game.

“It was ten years ago, that much you know, I think.”

I’ve never seen Ed look this discomfited.

“. . . It was a Friday night. We decided at the last minute we were both bored and wanted to go out. Hester was in Switzerland doing the au pairing.”

I’d forgotten that. Hester was working full time but took a summer sabbatical to teach English to a brood of rich kids. She’s one of those people who needs to staple extra pages to her CV as opposed to bumping the font size up, like me. Mark once said mine had EVELYN HARRIS so big it could be a flypast banner.

“Justin was in London that weekend on one of his bacchanals.”

I’m waiting for Ed to know where I was. You . . . we didn’t call you.

“You were off somewhere in the early days of Mark.”

Ah. This throws me, for a moment. I should’ve spotted it was that era.

“We went to the Tap and Tumbler, played pool, drank loads on an empty stomach, got accidentally wrecked, had half a pill each. Then we went to the club at Rock City . . .”

I wait. I can feel the rising heat of my sweat under my clothes.

“Remember they always played Rage Against the Machine? ‘Killing in the Name’ came on, and somehow”—he blows air out—“one thing led to another . . .”

“Oh don’t ‘one thing led to another’ me, Ed,” I snap, in my embarrassment as much as his. “You’re not telling the kids in class that your wife’s having a baby.”

Ed flushes.

I’m a paper tiger. I’m interrogating a man who is engaged to be married to someone else, not me, about sex that happened a decade ago, with another someone else who is no longer here. My rights here are far from clear. It wasn’t me who Ed cheated on, yet I feel jealous, betrayed, and gut-twistingly angry. I’m presenting as indignant and righteous but, in actual fact, I’m drowning in shame and confusion of my own.

This is why you don’t stay in dysfunctional unspoken love with spoken-for people. A few chess moves later, it looks completely mad. I guess it always was completely mad.

“You know, drunk air-punching during the chorus, turned into hugging, then woah, somehow, without knowing who started it, we’re kissing,” Ed says. “It was one of those spur-of-the-moment total pieces of insanity that seems to make sense to you when you’ve had five pints of lager on an empty stomach and you’re twenty-four-years old.”

“So you kissed, and . . . ?” I say.

“We went back to Suze’s to get drunker. Remember when she had the flat for debauchery in Lace Market? It was a getting-smashed escalation where doing the next thing, and the next, seemed a good idea, we were almost daring each other. We were off our faces. Neither of us left the house that night intending it.”