After You Left(38)

‘I feel like I’m in a rush because we have such little time.’

She told him that she had extended her ticket for another week.

‘What?’ he said, sitting up. ‘Another week? Why didn’t you tell me?’

Relief flooded his face suddenly. He kissed her before she could answer. Then he sighed and fell back on to the pillow again. ‘But then this week will come and go, and then we’re back here again, in this position again, aren’t we?’

She leant over him, and looked seriously into his eyes, the ends of her long, dark hair pooling on his chest. ‘We live for today – literally. Every minute we have together is a bonus we never expected. We take it, and we savour it, and we don’t overthink it. We don’t think, full stop.’ She popped another kiss on his mouth, kissed him all over his cheeks, his forehead. ‘Can we do that?’

‘We can try,’ he smiled.

They deliberately stopped talking. They lay there, instead, just enjoying the composition of themselves, perhaps both of them trying to deny what it was all adding up to. Then she said – so much for not thinking – ‘How can we have got in so deep, Eddy?’ They had been born into the same world, but had found themselves in vastly different ones. They ought to have nothing in common. She ought not to feel right with him, but she did. ‘You were just a man at a wedding.’

‘I don’t know how, Evelyn. But I was in deep the first second I saw you, and I’m going to selfishly and impractically want you in my arms like this until my dying day. That’s just the reality of it.’

Something occurred to her, in that moment. She had a sense of possibility – a sense that some of the best days of her life hadn’t happened yet. She smiled, because it was a lovely prospect.





FOURTEEN


Alice

‘What’s the prospect of you ever agreeing with me?’ Justin is lying on his side, his head propped on an upturned hand, looking down at me. ‘You’re so contrary.’

‘All I said was, it was a completely pointless film!’ I grin at him because he’s looking at me as though I’m an idiot. ‘It had no ending. It just, well, it just petered out . . . It was a total waste of two hours of my life!’

‘It did have an ending. You were supposed to supply it, using your im-ag-in-ation. You know, if you have one.’

I pick up a pillow and bash him over the head.

He grabs it off me, throws it across the bedroom, pulls me on to his chest by my upper arms and kisses me. ‘Argumentative Alice,’ he whispers. He flips me on to my back. I chuckle and knot my ankles around his waist. We have made love twice before that unbelievably banal, waste-of-life film – before and after our takeaway curry.

‘Condom?’ I say.

He looks at me, and stops. ‘Gosh! We’ve run out.’

I push at his shoulders. ‘What? How?’

‘Excuse me, I’m always astonished by my own prowess, but even I didn’t think we’d be doing it three times.’

‘No glove. No love,’ I practically sing.

He gives me a horrified look. ‘God, you didn’t seriously say that, did you?’

I beam. ‘No.’ I look across my shoulder. ‘It was her.’ I pull a face at the imaginary joy-killer. ‘Shut up, you!’

‘You’re a nutter.’ He pulls me to him again, to continue where we left off.

Afterward, we are back to the ‘side position, propped up on elbow, looking at one another’ thing, and I say, ‘Doesn’t it worry you that we didn’t use anything?’ It brings back memories of Colin. How – and this really is between me, my memory and the four walls – I used to try to convince him not to use protection. There was a time when I’d actually imagined that if I’d got pregnant, the very nature of learning you’re about to be a father would have convinced him that he wanted to be one. I really was that deluded.

‘Not really,’ Justin says. ‘I’m fine if you don’t want to use birth control. I mean, I would understand.’

‘Hang on . . . You want me to be the mother of your children? Out of wedlock?’

‘Leave my Catholic values out of this, thank you!’ He appears to be contemplating his proper response a second or two longer than you’d think would be necessary, given that it was a fairly basic question. Then he says, ‘Well, obviously I assume we’re going to, you know, have some sort of future together.’

‘As in, get married?’

‘That . . . Yes. But I’m just saying, as you get older, you think about these things more seriously. A woman’s biological clock. Or at least, a woman you care about.’

‘You think I’m approaching my sell-by date.’

He kisses me quickly and smiles – caught out. I go to bring another pillow down on his head.

‘I’m not being insulting!’ He pretends to hide behind his hands. ‘Or maybe I am . . . In which case, I’m sorry; that was not my intent. I just mean that, well, obviously you want to have a kid when you know you’re likely to have a healthy baby, right?’

I scowl at him. ‘But there’s never any guarantee of that.’

‘No. But your chances of a lot of things increase with waiting, Alice. And, don’t get me wrong, I’m thinking about myself in this, too. I’m thirty-eight. I also have a clock, in a way. I don’t want to be a sixty-year-old with a teenager, or be worrying about paying for their education when I’m seventy. And, like I say, I just have a feeling we’re going somewhere.’