Just Last Night(93)

“Your ex, Francis?”

“Yeah. I’ve had a revelation. He was great, and I treated him like shit.”

“OK.”

“I wasn’t ready to be someone’s boyfriend. I am now. But I don’t know if crawling back a year later and saying I’m older, wiser, and bereaved isn’t the most monumental piss-take of someone who was capable of being a fully rounded human being by age thirty. Who had to listen to me say I simply hadn’t slept with enough people to be settling down.”

“Only one way to find out. Don’t let your pride matter more than a shot at love,” I say.

“It isn’t an outrageous approach to make? The very premise isn’t offensive?”

“Not to me, but that’s for Francis to decide.”

Justin nods.

We both startle at the door opening behind us and Ed in a dressing gown, putting his head around the door. I assume we’re going to get a telling-off for making too much noise.

“Aren’t you two freezing?”

“We’re coming back in now, my nicotine urge sated,” Justin says. “Did we wake you?”

“No, couldn’t sleep,” he says.

I carry the storm lantern back to the kitchen table and Justin pours out whiskies.

“I’ll finish my wine, thanks,” I say, holding a palm up. I didn’t get to age thirty-four without knowing the law of group holidays and all hen dos—everyone completely canes it on the first night and is at reduced capacity for the rest of the trip.

“You two burning the midnight oil, then?” Ed says.

“Lots of sorrows to drown, one way or another,” Justin says. He raises his glass. “To Suze. Who’d have joined me for a cigarette and right now be trying to make a snowball.”

We clink glasses and I get the concrete-heavy emptiness in my stomach, because I’d passed another tiny milestone of grief—I’d forgotten to notice Susie isn’t here. I’d taken her absence for granted. We’re quieter without her, and the energy doesn’t crackle in the same way.

We chat about this and that, but this thought has sobered me right up. Also, the atmosphere is “off,” somehow.

Ed darts looks at me constantly. I get a peculiar sense that he’s nervy around me, trying to get my attention, or approval.

“I’m going to leave you lads to it,” I say, stroking Leonard’s ears.

Ed looks crestfallen. “Not like you to fold first?”

“Pacing myself,” I say.

In bed, a duvet pulled up to my chin that smells of “strange place,” I hear Justin and Ed creak up to bed on the hollow wooden staircase.

I know why Ed’s being weird. He thinks he has to strive to win what he once took for granted. He might be right.





37


I wake early in a constructive mood and put my hair in plaits, which I’ve not done for years—fearing it would be seen as a bid for male attention due to men in pubs who yanked them like bell pulls. As I fold thick sections of my hair over my fingers, I think of Finlay Hart, saying in his eyes I’d not failed at anything. He must be flying today or tomorrow. He might be in the sky right now.

In my mind’s eye, the image of Finlay Hart checking the gate for his flight, throwing his leather-strap watch in the security tray, preparing to step onto a plane: it gives me stomach pain.

The twinge provokes me to run over The People vs Finlay Hart for the umpteenth time. “Poison.” The Fin I met, and the one I remember from our childhood, could be aloof to the point of disconnected. Perhaps even lonely. You looked so worried, for a kid. Maybe it takes one to know one. All this animosity swirls around him, and all I can detect is an unbearable sadness. What was the Spanish flu about? Was he sickness or symptom? Or both?

I like him. I feel an affinity with him that I can’t explain, and I think it’s mutual. That’s what he was getting at when he told me about the jukebox song in the New York hipster bar.

I pick my way downstairs quietly and make a mountain of scrambled eggs before anyone’s awake, full of that hearty feeling of being up and useful when everyone else is asleep.

Unfortunately, Hester appears first, but it probably does us good to be forced into stiff small talk for the fifteen minutes or so it takes Ed to enter the dining room, flushed from the shower.

“You did all this? I’m in awe,” Ed says to me, as I bring another plate of toast to the table, and I shrug.

“Oh well I woke up early, for some reason.”

“Plus, you found time to style yourself as Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz,” he says, and I’m careful to pass on the other side of the table and sit down next to Hester, lest he make a playful grab. “You’re getting away with it ’cause you look that youthful.”

Hester’s eyes narrow at Ed. “They were bunches, not plaits.”

“Oh right,” Ed says, swigging his orange juice.

“There I am worrying about how you’d prefer my bridal hair and I bet I could wear a beanie, for all you’d care,” she says.

“Hahaha. Bridesmaids in rubber promotional Guinness logo top hats.”

Justin walks in in his grandad pajamas, yawning, Leonard at his feet, yapping. “Yes, Leonard, there is a tin of Chum in our luggage, if Ed hasn’t eaten it. Settle down.”