This Time Next Year(66)
‘Quinn, I just choked and you’re looking at your phone.’
‘You didn’t choke,’ he said weakly. ‘You spat it out.’
‘Just answer it,’ she said, closing her eyes.
Quinn hung up the call, switching his phone from vibrate to silent. He topped up Polly’s water glass with a shaking hand.
Polly called a waiter over and told him about the plastic in her dessert. She said she didn’t like to complain, but she was worried someone else’s pudding might be affected. He was profusely apologetic and brought over a complimentary bottle of champagne. Quinn tried to relax, but he couldn’t stop thinking about what might be going on at home. This feeling, of being made to be a bad boyfriend or a bad son, he hated it; it made him feel physically nauseous.
There was no crass countdown at Le Lieu de Rencontre. New Year was announced by the sound of glasses clinking and murmurs of ‘Happy New Year’ echoing around the room. Outside, the dark horizon erupted into shards of light tearing through the darkness. The distant boom and crackle of explosions audible even through the thick glass. Directly across the park, the fireworks appeared to converge in a fountain of light, and stardust rained from the sky.
They both sat in silence watching the spectacle outside. Then Polly slowly raised her glass to his, a pensive look in her eyes.
‘To us, to the next chapter,’ Quinn said with forced jollity. He could feel his forehead beading with sweat.
‘Just call her back,’ Polly said quietly, ‘I know you won’t relax until you do.’
Quinn walked out to the landing by the toilets. It would be rude to take a call at the table in a restaurant like this. He slumped to the floor at the top of the stairs and stared at his phone, his portable prison. To his left were double doors through to the kitchen, where he could hear clanking pans and curt voices. It was a room full of fiercely paddling feet that made the restaurant on the other side of the wall appear like an effortless gliding swan.
As he was about to call, a girl in chef’s whites with curly brown hair, came running through the doors. She was crying, and their eyes met for a second. She looked how Quinn felt – consumed by misery. He wanted to ask if she was OK, but she carried on down the stairs before he had a chance to speak. As she disappeared around the corner, he saw that the girl had dropped her chef’s hat on the stairs. A thought of Cinderella and a glass slipper flashed into his mind. In an alternate universe, he might run after that girl and return her hat. In this one he did not have the headspace for gallantry. He would hand her hat in to the kitchen.
His mother didn’t answer his call. He would have to go home. He walked slowly back into the restaurant to see a spectacle of fireworks still lighting up the horizon over the park. As he took his seat, Polly didn’t turn her head away from the window.
‘I’m sorry, Polly. I have to go,’ he said.
‘She’ll always come first, won’t she?’ Polly said.
‘No, not always. It’s New Year, it’s a bad time for her, Polly … ’
‘I don’t think I’m an especially needy person, Quinn, but you make me feel so needy and I hate it.’
‘You’re not needy, Polly. You are the only good thing in my life — ’
She cut him off.
‘Quinn, go home, let’s not do this now, just go and do what you need to do. I’m going to go and meet some friends at a club in Hoxton. Thank you for a lovely meal.’
She kissed him on the cheek, a lingering kiss. Something about it felt more final than simply a goodbye. And as she left, Quinn found the nauseous feeling began to recede and the tightness across his chest finally started to ease.
17 May 2020
Minnie stood on the grass bank, starring down into the murky brown water. Minnie first swam in Hampstead Ponds as a teenager, but the look of the water and the unnerving feeling of swimming when you couldn’t see your hands or feet had put her off. Plus, she’d been conditioned to swim fast in those days, and the ponds weren’t the best place for speed. Swimming was the one thing Minnie had been good at as a child, a sport she could do alone, with no one jeering at her. Or if they were jeering, she couldn’t hear them with her head underwater. She wasn’t sure why she’d given it up in her twenties – life and work had got in the way. Over the last few months, she had found herself drawn back to the water.
Hampstead Ponds were old reservoirs, now open to the public to swim in. They were dotted around the edge of Hampstead Heath – a beautiful, wild parkland which sprawled across nearly eight hundred acres of north London between Hampstead and Highgate. From the highest point you could see most of London, a Legoland of buildings and skyscrapers receding towards the horizon.
Minnie had always loved the heath. It was an idyllic, unspoilt oasis of nature in an otherwise tamed landscape. It served to remind the homogenised city dweller what wild grass and tumbling, tangled tree roots looked and smelt like. It wasn’t just the wild landscape Minnie loved, but the familiar characters she saw there. While all of London migrated to the heath in the summer, during the rest of the year you saw the same faces again and again. The regular pond swimmers were a tight-knit community in themselves, with some diehards going in all year round, cracking ice in the winter to get in.
Last autumn, Jean Finney, one of Minnie’s No Hard Fillings clients, had encouraged Minnie to give the ponds another chance. Jean swam regularly there herself, and spoke about the experience of wild swimming with almost religious reverence. Minnie hadn’t got around to it last year. Now, she had time on her hands and a newfound motivation – maybe bracing cold water would toughen her up, body and soul. She’d come for the first time a month ago. Today, the water still looked uninviting, but this time, once she was in, she soon forgot about the murk below, losing herself in the exhilarating sting of the cold and the simple pleasure of wild swimming.