We Own the Sky(97)

5

The hall is dark apart from a spotlight on Anna. I am standing at the back of a conference room in a smart Mayfair hotel, cloistered by thick walnut doors. The people watching are sitting, straight-backed without moving, shadows in suits and patent shoes. Only Anna’s face is visible. She is too far away, but her head is blown up on a big screen. She looks confident, austere, her hair tightly swept back off her face.

I think about the last few weeks we spent together. Drinking vodka behind drawn curtains; the smell of bleach; the washing machine on an endless cycle; Anna whispering to her mother in another room.

I listen, move a little closer to the stage. Anna is talking about “ethical accounting.” After Enron, a need for the profession to regain the public’s trust.

That meant more than codifying good practices, she says, pulling up another slide. It was about bringing back the original—and now unfashionable— underpinnings of good, solid accounting.

The audience is clapping and Anna walks to the side of the stage, shaking hands with someone in the wings. The lights have now been turned on and the accountants start filing out, carrying folders of materials, their name badges on lanyards around their necks.

Anna is still speaking to people by the stage, and I watch as she kisses a smartly dressed older woman on the cheek. Slowly, they start to walk out, close but not touching. As she sees me, she makes her excuses and walks to where I am standing.

“Hello,” she says. She does not smile but she does not frown. Something in between.

“Hi,” I say, and I blush, and it is as if we are meeting for the first time. What is remarkable—so striking that I have to take a second furtive look—is to see how little she has changed, how beautiful she still is.

“You look very well,” she says.

“So do you,” I say, and I want to hug her but I don’t, and keep my hands down by my side.

As we walk out toward the lobby, I steal a few looks at her again. Her hair is longer than I remember and she is a little thinner, toned, I assume from all the marathon running.

“Would you mind giving me fifteen minutes to say hello to a few people, and I’ll meet you back here? Is that okay?”

“Of course,” I say. “Are you sure that’s enough time? I don’t mind waiting longer.”

“Have you been to an accountancy convention before, Rob?”

“No.”

“I have,” she says without smiling. “I’ll meet you in fifteen.”

I wait in the lobby, my hands clammy with sweat. After exactly fifteen

minutes, Anna appears in her coat, carrying a laptop bag over her shoulder.

“I’m ready. Are you hungry?”

“I am a bit.”

“There’s a decent Thai place around the corner. Fancy it?”

“Sounds great.”

For a few moments, we walk in silence. It is like the first time we met, at Lola’s party in Cambridge, and how I was so desperately trying to think of something to say. “So how was the conference?”

“Oh, you know. Has to be done.”

“Are you working here in London now?”

“Mostly. I’m just consulting. And you? Are you still living down in

Cornwall?”

“Yes,” I say, and we walk on in silence because, now, suddenly, I don’t know what to say.

The restaurant is the sort of place we would have come to in our London lives, the type of light, finicky food we both used to like. We sit in a corner booth on austere wooden benches, the walls hemming us in like a crypt.

“It’s strange to see you after all this time,” Anna says. “I feel a bit nervous to be honest.”

“Yeah, me too. Sorry, I’m being a bit of a freak. It is nice to see you, though.”

“It is,” Anna says. She smiles but it is a sad smile, and I don’t know what it means. She looks down at her menu. “So are you ready to order?”

“Sure,” I say, although I have barely looked. As I choose my food, I glance at her hands and notice that she is not wearing a wedding ring.

“I’m surprised you didn’t know it was me,” she says after the waiter takes our order.

“How do you mean?”

“Chatting on  Hope’s Place.”

“Oh,” I say. “I had no idea to be honest.”

“Really?” Anna says, because she had always loved parlor games, charades. “I was convinced you would guess, especially after I mentioned the goggles in the bath.”

“No, not at all. I really didn’t. If you hadn’t given yourself away, I wouldn’t have known. Although, when I thought about it afterward, the name of your daughter, Lucy, did make sense.”

Lucy, the name Anna had given to the second child we had lost.

The waiter puts down our drinks. A glass of wine for Anna, a water for me.

“I’m really glad you’re not drinking anymore,” Anna says after the waiter left.

“So am I,” I say, but it stings a little. The drunk who doesn’t like being told they are a drunk. There is a silence, a familiar silence. The silence across the kitchen table after Jack had gone.

“So,” I say, taking a drink of my sparkling water and daring to look her in the eyes for the first time. “I know I’ve said it before, but I wanted to say sorry in person. I said some unforgivable things to you, about Jack, about the treatment in Prague. Unforgivable. I just lost it, with the booze, with everything. I know that’s no excuse and I don’t expect you to forgive me. But I do want to apologize. I really am so, so sorry...”