The Love Market (11 page)

‘He sounds much the same actually.’

Her eyes are gazing off across the water. I believe that Jacqui has always envisaged Patrick and me being reunited. Years ago, when I came home with my broken heart, she said that Patrick and I should have done our own “affair to remember” and agreed to meet again in the Love Market ten years on—no matter what else might have been going on with our lives at that point. ‘When are you going to speak to him again?’ she asks.

I gaze at the lashings of mascara on her already superhumanly long eyelashes. ‘I don’t know. Maybe never. The conversation was quite brief really. Almost as though he rang out of some sense of—I don’t know, politeness or duty.’

She gives me a scolding look. ‘Duty? He probably just felt as strange as you did. Don’t worry, he’ll phone again.’

‘How can you be so sure?’

She meets my eyes now. ‘Celine, a man doesn’t phone after fifteen years if he’s not still thinking about you. If he’s got no intentions of ever phoning again.’

A flutter of nerves hits my stomach just at the possibility of his phone call unlocking a door. ‘But I can’t start obsessing about him Jacq! Not after all this time.’

She stares after a couple of nicely dressed businessmen who stroll past, immersed in conversation. ‘But I thought you never stopped?’

In spite of myself I grin at her. ‘Well, that’s one way to put it. But if I’m to make any more money, Jacqui, or even maintain my current income level, I have to get focussed. I have to find new ways of getting The Love Market out there. I need more clients. Word of mouth and local advertising is one thing, but it’s not enough. I’m on my own now; I’ve a mortgage. I can’t be daydreaming about my nonexistent love life and letting my real priorities fall by the wayside.’

She stares out across the water again, at the stunning glass building of the Sage Centre for Music, which, as an architect, is one of her favourite in the city. ‘Can’t you think about both?’

‘No! I’m not that clever!’

We chuckle.

I peer at her through narrowed eyes. ‘Why would you write nothing, by the way? That’s the bit that intrigues me the most? I mean, I can understand you contacting him—I suppose—given the years you’ve spent dreaming of my love affair and making it your own. But I can’t understand why you’d send a blank email! Who would do that?’

She laughs, exasperated, but she’s blushing madly. ‘I told you I didn’t email him! I’m pleased you give me all this credit though. But I’m not that clever.’

‘Ha ha!’

I have to smile at her. She looks voluptuously sexy in a short fitted black skirt and jacket, with her slim and shapely legs shown off in high heels. Jacqui has the kind of body that gets men tripping over their tongues when they pass her.

‘I should have asked him if he has kids. It’s almost as though, by not really asking him anything about himself, he might have thought I really couldn’t have cared.’

‘He won’t think that. But this could be the reason for you ringing him back. You could just say,
‘now Patrick, while we’re on the topic of you not being married any more…
’

I playfully slap her.

‘Come on. I have to go back to work soon,’ she moans. We get up off the bench and start walking. Before she does go back to the office, she wants me to have a quick peek with her in a shop to help her find a dress for a work “do”. And I know there’s a reason why she wants to look extra lovely.

~ * * * ~

He told me from the outset that he’d only have four days. Then he was expected back in Hong Kong. He had a job, stories to file. This had already been an unscheduled side-trip.

By the end of the second day, the countdown to him going was there between us. He was edgy. I tried not to be. I tried to make it okay that I was going to lose him. That I understood the deal.

‘Fly there with me!’ he said, on our last night. ‘You’ll love Hong Kong. I’ll get you somewhere ... a hotel.’ I could see his brain wildly thinking through possibilities, taking the idea on board. He had a way of always looking like he was pacing the floor, even when he was sitting down. A relentless energy that always made him appear to be in the grips of something.

‘For how long?’

‘For however long we want. We can work that out as we go along.’

‘I’ll just—what—live in a hotel with you?’

His mind was thinking ahead. He pulled himself back to my question. ‘Until I…. Well, yes. Or an apartment. Somewhere.’

‘So you’ll have your marriage, and I’ll be what? Your mistress?’ The idea was absurd yet freakishly plausible.

‘Mistress? God no. I don’t want a mistress!’ He looked at me, in genuine exasperation now, as though the very word offended everything he stood for and believed in. It was a look I could close my eyes and see for years—the intensity of the man—even when I’d almost, frustratingly, forgotten the details of his face. ‘Come up with something better,’ he said. ‘There has to be a better way. A solution. What the hell are we going do, Celine?’

The idea of going with him and ending up being whatever I ended up being to him hammered there, along with my heart. It’s not like I had anything to hurry back to England for. He was the one who was married. In a way he was asking me to find him an ‘out’, and part of me thought that if he really wanted to find one, he should be capable of doing it himself. But still, I didn’t want us to end on a fight. Our brains rattled off in a million directions then we just looked at one another, speechless, in acknowledgement of how impossible it all was. I couldn’t stand to think that this was our last night and in the morning he would leave. He’d go back to his wife, and I’d be out there searching for the rest of my life desperately trying to feel this again with somebody else, and probably failing.

‘Can’t you leave her?’ I said, because it had to be said. Yet I knew that the question was unnecessary: Patrick was not going to leave his wife, this much was clear. And deep down, I didn’t really think it fair that he did. She’d found him first. She’d trusted him to go off on his own, for his work, and was this how he was going to repay her? By leaving her for someone he met in his travels? It didn’t seem fair. Yet, I wanted him. And if he’d said
I’ll leave her
, then I’m sure I’d have recovered from my guilt pretty easily. ‘Tell her you’ve met someone and you’ve fallen in love.’

‘I have fallen in love,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure about that. But I can’t just walk in after having been away for only four days and tell her our marriage is finished, Celine, because I met you. I mean, you must see that. She gave up everything to follow me around the world. She’s in a new country. She doesn’t know anyone. We’ve barely been married two minutes!’

He’d said this earlier: about everything she’d given up, without being specific. I’d got the impression she hadn’t really wanted to follow him half way around the world, that he felt guilt about this. When I asked him more, he said he didn’t want to spend our time together talking about her. And neither did I really.

But the more he said he couldn’t do it, the more I thought that he could, and maybe he should. Or at the very least, maybe he should have given me a greater indication that it was a hard choice for him to make.

We went through the motions of eating, drinking rice wine. Then, when it came to having sex for the last time, neither one of us could bring ourselves to, so we just lay there, bare arm next to bare arm. In my side vision I could see the prominent bridge of his nose, his steady blinking. Patrick’s mind always working.

‘What are we going to do?’ were his last words before we both went to sleep. But I’d given him the only answer I could think of.

Next morning, he wasn’t there when I opened my eyes. I thought he’d snuck off while I was sleeping. I thought
this is how I’ll always remember you; as a person who sneaks off, without having the guts to say a proper good-bye, after everything we have been through.
And then I saw his bag.

He was standing outside. Very still. His long body, narrow back, legs a stride apart, his blondish, wavy hair. His dilemma was palpable. I could see it. I could feel it. I ached for him. And I knew then: that, as bad as it was for me, it was equally as bad for him. A low mist hung over everything, blanking out our view. Just me and him and this small, primitive place. He turned and looked at me, as if to say, ‘I’m still here.’

Back inside, I watched him pack the rest of his stuff. I remember the quick sound of him zipping up his bag. That zip sounded like it belonged on the bag of a man who was dying to get the hell out of there. When he stood there with his bag in hand and looked at me, in the still dim early light I could almost feel his relief. In his mind he’d crossed his point of no return. He was on his way back home, to what felt familiar, and safe, and the right thing to do.

You’ll walk out of this door and I’ll never see you again, I thought, as I said the words, vaguely threatening—‘Don’t look back at me once you walk out of this door...’

He stopped by the door, rested his head on his forearm, on the wooden frame. He didn’t lift his face from his arm, stayed like this while, clearly, he went on wrestling with himself.

Then he said, ‘I have to go,’ as though telling himself, rather than me. Or, as though his better judgement was telling him.

And then he went.

~ * * * ~

‘Where are you?’ Jacqui asks me as we climb the steep bank of Grey Street that leads from the Quayside to the main clothes shops that are collected around Eldon Square shopping centre.

‘Sorry, lost in thought…’ I try to bring myself back to her and to the reason why I believe we are going shopping now. ‘So how is the office romance these days?’ A workman leans his handsome face out of a van and wolf whistles at us, his eyes clamped on Jacqui’s legs.

Christian Taylor is the new project manager at Jacqui’s firm. He’s a dead-ringer for Brad Pitt—or so she tells me—and he always wears a navy Paul Smith suit with a navy shirt, which makes me wonder if he’s spent all his money on that one outfit and he’s now got nothing else to wear. And Jacqui has a little crush. This would be fine. People are allowed to have crushes on co-workers. But they’re not supposed to have them when they’re about to get engaged to their live-in boyfriend of five years.

‘I have updates,’ she says, excitedly. ‘We had an incident in the lift.’

‘Incident?’

She sees my face. ‘No. Not that kind of incident. I wish! Just, well, we were both going down for lunch—not together of course; I wish that too… but there were all these people in, all these bodies between us, and yet his eyes were fixed on me. And every time someone moved, blocking us, he’d peek around them, playfully, so he could see me again. So we could continue the eye-game. It was so hot. I just wanted to push people aside and ravish him.’ She gazes at me with sparkling eyes. The look she always gets when she talks about Christian, yet one I’ve never seen when she talks or looks at Rich.

The bank is steep. I am winded. There is something about this fellow that I don’t like, and I don’t know why. It’s not as though I’ve even laid eyes on him, to formulate a proper impression. ‘But what if he’s like this with all the girls? Do you really want a man who every other woman wants? Imagine his ego.’

‘Well, you can certainly smell the pharomones when he leaves the room.’

‘I think the pharaohs are in tombs in Egypt probably smelling very dodgy in their own right, but it’s the pheromones you’re on about.’

She chortles and stops walking and turns to me, all aglow. ‘Oh Celine! Driving home, I sat through a full traffic light change. And I feel so bad for Rich. I mean I have this good man who wants to marry me, and I love him, in almost all the right ways. Then there’s how much I badly want to kiss Christian, a complete unknown quantity, who flirts with me to the point where it’s all I get up for on a morning. Rich is about to take me on holiday for my birthday and propose, yet I just want to be locked up in a photocopier room—just me and Christian’s mouth. Those big succulent lips, the bottom one that looks a little bit split, like Angelina Jolie’s.’

‘You had me until you mentioned Angelina Jolie.’ So many of my male clients cite Angelina as the type of woman they’re looking for. It gets tiresome. Although I have as many women who want Daniel Craig. Everyone thinks that if they’re paying for it, this entitles them to someone several degrees out of their league. ‘But you’d probably want other parts than just his lips,’ I tease.

‘I wouldn’t! For me, kissing has always been better than sex. A kiss has something ahead of it. Sex has nowhere else to go.’

She gazes at my face with that half-here, half-in-some-romantic-netherland expression in those eyes. ‘I love that whole time before it actually happens, you know, when you’re wondering which one of you is going to make that first move. I love that tantalizing anticipation of what he’s going to kiss like. And that split second when his face moves in, right before you find out.’ She looks up at the sky and inhales longingly, then smiles at me. ‘I’m not the matchmaker in the family, but my theory is, a kiss can determine an awful lot about your compatibility. I think if you both like to do a lot of kissing, your relationship will survive the bumps in the road.’ She is looking at me like a person who has walked out of a very romantic movie and realised her life doesn’t measure up, only she’s forgot it’s not actually supposed to.