Just Last Night(79)

Ed, in a toilet? I say to her, sternly. She falls silent.

I pick at a drink coaster. “She’d have thought my tragic love for Ed was exactly that though, tragic. Why would she envy it?”

“If you don’t mind me saying, based on a very short acquaintance—you seem to take people at their word, which is a really good quality, but maybe leaves you short of an answer at times. Susie mocked plenty of things, but it wasn’t necessarily representative of how she felt, deep down. As far as I know, she never fell in love with anyone. You were in love, and that would’ve fascinated her. What happened with Ed . . . she was probably trying to find out why. She was exploring, trying to feel what you felt. She was rifling through your closets when you were away.”

I sip my drink and think I have amateur-hour tangoed with an absolute ballroom professional here. His analysis is a series of controlled explosions.

“She was snooping?”

“Yeah, emotionally, experientially, snooping. You were with your ex throughout the Ed thing? The one who’s now on the West Coast? How did that work, given your hang-up?” Fin says.

I gulp and shrug and feel ancient guilt.

“Like any torch you carry over a very long time, I suppose. I put the torch in a cupboard for the duration and there was still a faint glow. When Mark and I fell apart, it was still there. Mark accused me of not being willing to leave the group behind and move with him to London. He principally meant Susie, but I’ll always wonder if Ed was a factor too. He must have been, I suppose.”

“What was your reason for not going at the time?”

“Well . . . Mark was this laconic, funny, super-talented, and ambitious hack type. I admired him more than I ever felt feelings for him. I turned office banter into going to the pub and the pub into a one-night stand and a one-night stand into a fling, and a fling into a relationship. It was all powered by wishing and hoping for the love of my life to have arrived. But at the point he wanted me to give my life up for a life with him, it was too much. The jig was up. I’d conned myself first and Mark second. It was shit of me. But I didn’t intend it . . .” I trail off and break into a grin. “Hah. Like you said. God. It’s so clear, when I look at it now.”

Fin smiles back. “Yes, relationships. So obvious what was going on in hindsight. Especially when described to third parties in hotel bars, over some sort of classic drink with four units of alcohol and a curl of fruit peel in it.”

My phone blinks with a WhatsApp message from Ed. I slide to open it.

Good to hear from you, Harris. Justin tells me you’re going on dressy dinner dates?! Is the brother’s idea that you might find his dad down the leg of a pair of silk stockings? X

It’s so lumpenly manipulative, in the black and white speech bubble of text. That is the possessiveness of a boyfriend, with a built-in plausible deniability of Concerned BFF if I called him on it. I feel something approaching contempt.

What space does Ed imagine making for me, on the other side of his wedding, their having kids? It’s like he’s got me trapped playing the Janeane Garofalo role in a Will They Won’t They?, which he knows, in his heart of hearts, is already a They Never Did. He’s going to marry Uma Thurman. It’s the hope that kills you.

“What about you, then?” I say, thinking I have a clear run at nosiness, now. “You and . . . Rowena? Romilly!”

“Ah.” Fin smiles an eye-creasing, sheepish smile, and looks into his drink as his hair falls forward a little, and my heart goes boom, whether I like it or not. “She’s my ex, as said.”

“I got a sense from her call she is a semidetached ex.”

“Yes, your senses are correct. I ended it in the spring, but she’s convinced I’m going to change my mind.”

“Are you?”

“Oof. More of these, before I can do that? Same again, thanks,” Fin says at my nodding, and gestures to the barman. “No, I’m not, but I have a relationship with her five-year-old that I’m finding very hard to walk away from. Also, she said a thing in our final fight that I can’t forget. I’ve lain awake in the dark, thinking about it.”

“Was it . . . life is one vile fuckin’ task after another? Al Swearengen, Deadwood.”

Fin laughs, fully corpses, and I know I’ve definitively broken through the hard carapace with him. Susie would’ve found that funny too.

“She said . . . ah, thanks.” Fresh drinks arrive. Fin waits for the barman to move away. “She said . . . you don’t want me because I remind you too much of yourself.”

“. . . Oh.”

“Mmm.”

“What did she mean?”

“She means—well, she said as much—I’m tough and I’m cynical and my faith in people is broken. But I want an optimistic, kind, more gentle person to restore all that. Someone who, if I actually got, she said, I would eat alive and pick my teeth with her bones.”

“Oh.” On my bare knowledge, Romilly sounds like she might have him sussed.

“Plus, she said, ‘That sweetness and light girl has no chat,’” he grins.

“No chat?”

“No wit, no comebacks, no spark. Can’t make me laugh.”

“Did she have someone in mind?”

“No. It was very Romilly to be disgusted by even the thought of the next person I might date.”