After You Left(5)

Sally is normally the person who tries to understand me even when she doesn’t understand me. That’s all I want – her to feel for me and to constructively commiserate, not to tell me how to feel. I stare at the bread basket and contemplate this assessment she’s just made. ‘I don’t know what to say. I wouldn’t say I’m calm – more numb. I suppose I’m worried more than anything else. We don’t know what’s wrong with him, do we? What his reasons are . . . And it must be something. It’s just too out of character for him.’

She is watching me with an element of incredulity. ‘Admittedly, though,’ I add, ‘I was more worried about his welfare earlier, before I learnt he’d rung his secretary. So we know he isn’t dead. He wasn’t rendered mute. He’s had his act together enough to prioritise his job . . .’

She dips a rectangle of focaccia in a small bowl of rosemary olive oil, and brings it quickly to her mouth before it drips. ‘But why do his reasons matter?’ She frowns. ‘I mean, what could he possibly say that would make what he did okay?’

I suddenly have a profound sense of my own inadequacy. She’s right. Why aren’t I more furious? Why am I being so charitable? ‘I don’t know,’ I tell her. We sit there in silence, just looking at one another, neither of us knowing where to take the topic next.

Sally is my closest friend. I’ve known her since I moved here from Uni in Manchester. We met at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, at a function she’d organised – she’s an event planner. The one downside of moving to a new area was that I was lacking a proper friend, and then there was this woman around my own age who was so straight-up and funny and fresh. We’d both shown up in the same peacock-blue and emerald-green dress – an immediate conversation starter. We’d even joked that she’d bought it for eighty-nine pounds and I had only paid fifty. The rapport was instant. There is nothing I haven’t shared with her over the years. Nothing she hasn’t been able to relate to. No boyfriend horror story that she couldn’t take on board as if it were her own, even though we have led very different lives when it comes to relationships. Sally married John, who was her first boyfriend, and has seventeen-year-old twin girls. I have had one long post-Uni involvement that ended when I was twenty-eight because he suddenly decided he wanted to go and live in Australia – and not with me. Then there was Colin, who didn’t want marriage and children. Between Colin and Justin there were a few ill-advised flings, just to prove to myself that I could do casual without always being on the lookout for The One. Or, perhaps because I was hoping that if I stopped trying too hard, what I wanted would waltz along, loosely affirming the laws of attraction. Somehow, they had all just felt like stepping-stones on the path to Justin.

‘It’s just such a monstrous thing to do,’ Sally says now, looking at my food. ‘I just don’t know what kind of person would abandon his wife on their honeymoon, halfway across the world!’ It comes out a little loud. The couple at the next table look across. Suddenly, it’s as though the eyes of a thousand people are on me, instead of just two.

‘I don’t know,’ I say again. I realise I’ve said that too many times already.

The smell of grated cheese hits me. I stare at the sickly-looking, sloppy white pasta. It appears to be wobbling. But then I realise it’s not the food moving, it’s me. I’m trembling with the force of reality rewriting itself. The quiet panic. The distant urge to throw up again.

‘Are you okay?’ she asks. ‘You look awful.’

‘I don’t want to judge him, Sally. Not yet. Not until I know more.’ I can’t look her in the eyes. I can feel her watching me and thinking that I’m either very fair or quite pathetic – neither of which means much to me right at this minute.

‘There was a phone call while we were away,’ I say, after a while. He hadn’t been himself. The delayed responses, the distant stares off to the side of my head when I was talking. He always had multiple things going on in his mind. Sometimes, you had to fight for your spot there, but when you fully got his attention, it was worth it. At the time, I felt like saying, We’re on honeymoon! Can’t you just leave work back in bloody Newcastle? But it’s only now that I’m bringing it up that it blazes with significance.

‘We were sitting on our balcony, drinking wine. When he answered the phone, he quickly left the room – just sort of shot up out of his chair.’

Justin always went somewhere private to take calls. I found it a bit insulting. But he never normally went with this alacrity. ‘When he came back, he seemed in a strange mood. Dark somehow. Very changed.’

I can see him sitting in profile, motionless and unblinking, a moment or two after I’d asked him if he thought I should open another bottle of wine, and he hadn’t seemed to have heard.

‘Who do you think it was?’ Sally appears spellbound. ‘Did he not say? Didn’t you ask?’

‘He said it was something about a file at work. But it would have only been 4 a.m. in the UK. Who would be ringing him from work at that hour?’

The waitress sets Sally’s pizza down and offers another apology, mumbling something about a free dessert. Sally, who normally has the appetite of two construction workers, doesn’t even register the arrival of her food.

‘What if he’s in some sort of trouble?’ I say. ‘You know how stressful his job can be. He once said that if he committed professional negligence, he would move to Buenos Aires and never come back.’ All these conversations that were a bit strange at the time. I’d assumed he was joking, of course. But he certainly appeared to have his plan thought through! ‘Or maybe he’s got money problems. I know he’s highly leveraged. The apartment building he owns, and then his interest in the firm . . . Maybe he’s made some terrible mistake at work.’ It was too exaggerated to be possible – besides, Justin wasn’t that careless. And yet the possibilities were more palatable than the idea that he had someone else.