The Love Market (17 page)

I can feel him studying me, as I look distantly out of the window, across the road, through the traffic sliding by, thinking of all that he is telling me, and of how he has just made love to me and I can still feel that pull toward him that was always there. ‘Why didn’t you tell me any of this back then? You should have, Patrick. I was so gutted by losing you. I deserved at least to know what the reasons were.’

He wipes his mouth with his napkin. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t handle it right. I wasn’t handling a lot of things right back then. A part of me couldn’t bring myself to talk to you about her because I didn’t even fully know my own mind.’

We stare at one another. And I can tell that, whatever highs he might have had in his career, this is not a happy face. I am not looking at someone who is content with his life. ‘We didn’t know each other, did we?’ he says. ‘It was four days. And while you can learn a lot about someone in that time, you usually don’t go making life-altering decisions on the strength of it.’

His words ground me. He’s absolutely right, of course. I see that now. I didn’t see it then.

‘If I’d told you exactly how I felt, you’d have encouraged me to leave her. And you’d have probably been right to. But I had to decide that on my own. I wanted to make sure it was about me and her. Not me, you and her. It wouldn’t have felt fair for me to do that to her.’

I nod slowly. We finish eating. ‘I wouldn’t mind some fresh air,’ I tell him.

He pays the bill and we leave. He takes hold of my hand as we walk down the high street. ‘If you’d been forgettable I’d have forgotten you.’ He squeezes my hand. ‘If I wasn’t still curious about you, I’d not have found myself flying the Atlantic, with hardly a minute’s thought put into the decision, just for the chance to see you again.’

A flock of birds flap their wings in my stomach. ‘But you came here for business.’

He kisses my cheek. ‘There was no business. Just this business.’

We intend to walk as far as Hyde Park but our legs instinctively re-route back to the hotel, where he makes love to me again.

‘So tell me about this crazy job of yours,’ he says, after, propping his head up with an arm and lying on his side, looking at me.

‘It’s not crazy! I don’t know why men always think what I do for a living is funny.’

‘I don’t think it funny. The journalist in me just wonders how you made the leap from meeting me fifteen years ago in the famously romantic Love Market, and having a disastrously failed, albeit very intense relationship, and then you go home and decide to go into the matchmaking business. I mean, it would make more sense if ours had been a love affair that hadn’t ended so badly.’

My eyes can’t stop consuming him, and I’m shocked again how attractive he still is. ‘It really didn’t have anything to do with meeting you,’ I tell him. ‘It was just a fluke.’

I tell him the story of how my company came to be, and about some of my clients, while he traces a finger over my collarbones and up and down my throat. Then he picks up one of my hands and stares at it, gently turning it over in his, as though he’s fascinated by it. ‘It must seem unbelievably superficial after what you do for a living.’

‘Yes,’ he says, shocking me, and I laugh.

‘Oh well at least you’re honest.’

‘No. I’m joking. It’s not superficial at all. Being responsible for somebody’s happiness and the biggest personal decision they will make in their lives is hardly something to be taken lightly.’ He kisses the dip in my throat. ‘I think I’d rather have my job than yours. Any day.’

The same serious expression that I remember. The nose that I loved: long and fine-boned, with quite the pronounced bridge that gave his face a certain appealing, aristocratic imperfection. The type of nose that means a person is intelligent and engaging, and routine work is not their specialty. The intense dark eyes—if you were going to search him for flaws—just the tiniest little bit too close together, but perhaps noticeable only to someone who was a student of facial biometrics. He gazes at me as though he’s getting a fix from my face. Then his uber-intense expression launches into a smile, and an unforgotten longing fills me.

‘Do you want to go out for a walk?’ he asks.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Why would I want to go for a walk?’

We make love again. When I get up and go to the toilet, I stare at my flushed face in the mirror. Then when I come back in the bedroom, he has pulled on a T-shirt and is propped up with a pillow, quite at home. Trying to look relaxed, but failing spectacularly.

As I stand still in the doorway, all I can think is this: I could have been married to him all these years. We could have been on holiday and this could be the most natural thing in the world, me coming out of the bathroom and him lying here on our bed.

~ * * * ~

When we do eventually go out for a walk, my mobile rings. It’s Kim. I had sent her on a date with Ralph Caswell, a fifty-one-year-old divorced dentist. If I don’t pick up, she’ll ring back until I do.

‘Everything was going fine, until he came back from the toilet,’ she says.

Oh no. I can’t do this now.

‘It wasn’t until he’d sat down again, and put his napkin back on his knee that I saw it. It was suspended there, between his nose hairs like an anaemic spider in a web. It actually glistened, like a bead of dew.’

I put my head in a hand.

‘It was moving in and out with his breathing. Like it had a mind and a central nervous system of its own. I spent the entire meal riveted to it, waiting for the moment when it was going to fall into his food.’

‘Kim,’ I say, my walk slowing now, and Patrick looking at me. ‘Look, I’m in London right now, but I’m coming back shortly. So let’s meet. Let’s sit down, have a glass of wine and a chat.’

‘About my refund?’

‘That. And about how things are going in general.’

‘They’re not going very well, are they? I’d rather talk about my refund.’

‘I know. I realise. And I promise you that if after we’ve chatted, and you still want a refund, I will give it to you.’

‘Can I have that in writing?’ she says.

We hang up. I look at Patrick and smile. ‘I think I’d rather have your job too,’ I say.

In the morning we walk down Queen’s Gate all the way to High Street Kensington, and have coffee at Café Nero, before moving on to Kensington Palace gardens. I tell him about Aimee, the accident, the divorce, and how with every decision I’ve ever made in my life, I’ve spent far too long second-guessing whether I’ve done the right thing. It’s a wonder I’ve ever managed to run a business.

‘They’ve offered me a job in Toronto, with a television network, anchoring the nightly news,’ he says. ‘They’ve given me twenty days to sign the contract.’

‘Wow. That sounds very glamorous. You’re going to be on the TV every day? What’s to decide? Don’t you want it?’

‘I should. Since I pulled out of the Middle East, I’ve been back in Toronto kind of spinning my wheels, doing a bit of lecturing at college, waiting for assignments, but not getting the same fulfilment from the work any more. Before that I spent the last six years in one of the deadliest spots in the world for foreign press, so if I’m going to leave, the time is now and this couldn’t be a better opportunity. The network wants young blood. Someone who can interview and ask all the tough questions. They think I’m it.’

‘That’s fantastic,’ I study him. ‘Isn’t it?’

‘Maybe. For some. But I’m not sure I know how to be on the other side. My entire career has been standing there in the hotspots of conflict. I’ve spent my life reporting breaking news and trying to find a way to add the context, thriving on the pure adrenalin of it. I’ve been part of a team of people, Celine—reporters, TV crews, photographers, not just those from the AP but from bureaus all over the world, back in the heyday, before the bureaus started falling like dominos. These people’s idea of relaxing is jamming into a high-risk bar in Baghdad to talk shop, debrief, bounce around ideas that might help us all broaden our understanding of the complex stories we were immersed in. This has been my life. I don’t know how to have a home, in a city, how to go into an office, sit in a chair and speak into a camera day after day after day. Even though, yes, they’d be paying me three times my salary to do it. And I’m probably going to live to see out my old age.’

‘But surely your life’s more important than some adrenaline rush?’

‘Try telling an alcoholic that his liver is more important than his vodka.’ He smiles distantly, bringing his eyes back to mine. ‘Anyway enough about that. Tell me about Mike,’ he says. ‘I know you’ve told me some things, but, I guess…I’m sorry. Maybe it’s wrong for me to ask.’

I hesitate for a moment or two, transitioning into this new territory. ‘Mike. Well… Mike is the most decent, most guileless man in the world. He’s a great father, and he was a good husband. And he deserved to be married to someone who had no doubts.’ I look at him.

He holds my eyes. And then he kisses me, affectionately, on the cheek. ‘You and I wouldn’t have had doubts,’ he says. ‘If I’d been able to marry you back then.’

~ * * * ~

We stand admiring Kensington Palace through its black and gold gates. We watch the dogs playing off lead, one of them friskily trampling over ornamental flowerbeds, and the couples out walking, enjoying their park on this beautiful May day. We gaze at each other, the way two people do who are quite fascinated with each other and have no one they have to hide it from.

‘What are we going to do?’ he asks me, abruptly. That same urgency he had back in Sa Pa, in his hut, right before he was leaving to go back to his wife.

‘I honestly don’t know.’ I knew this would come up. I had just had a moment where I’d caught myself being aware that I’m too happy. ‘A part of me always believed that if I ever did meet you again, you could never live up to my fantasies. You know, when you want something, and you obsess about it, you make it more than it really is? So this is all rather shocking, that you actually are living up to them!’

He drags me out of the path of a family of geese who seem to be on a mission to peck my feet. Patrick thinks it funny.

‘What we need is some perspective on this,’ he says. ‘A reality-check. The fact is, neither of us is married.’ He releases my hand and puts his arm around me. ‘So theoretically, anything is possible. You live in the north east of England, and I live, for now anyway, in Toronto. Admittedly a small but fixable problem.’

‘Fixable how?’

‘I haven’t got to that part yet. I’m at the perspective stage, not the clarity stage. But what I always find is you never have one without the other, so I’m just waiting for the solution to hit me.’

‘What I think is going to happen is, you’re going to go home to your beautiful Canada, accept your fabulous job and become an overnight sex symbol for the entire female Canadian population. And I—’

I can’t say the words
I’ll never see you again
because they’re going to kill me, and, besides, I don’t want to give him ideas.

‘—We’ll email, keep in touch, see each other when you pass through London.’

‘No,’ he says, stopping on sun-dappled ground under the canopy of a huge plane tree, and facing me, gripping me by the shoulders. ‘That won’t do for me. Maybe it would have weeks ago. Maybe before I came here. But now…’

‘Hang on, I was going to add “until it gradually fizzles out”.’

He pulls me into him as he leans back against the tree. ‘It’s not going to fizzle out. I made a bad decision years ago. I’m not going to make another one.’ He rests his chin on the top of my head. ‘I’m not sure what I can promise you right this very second, because as I said, I don’t have an instant solution, but I can promise you that. Occasionally getting together while we’re both living different lives isn’t what I would like or would be prepared to setting for, I don’t think.’ He looks at me in complete seriousness. ‘It’s either all or nothing. That’s just the way I am.’

He pops a kiss on my cheek. ‘So which is it going to be?’ he says.

Back at the hotel, I check my email, and try phoning Aimee to make sure everything’s all right, but she’s not answering her mobile so I just leave a message, repeating that I’ll be home tomorrow night.

I have several emails. The first is from Kim, wanting to get together to talk, “so I can get this over with and get my refund.” I told her I was in London! Gosh! Leave me alone! The second is from Jacqui, asking ‘How is it going?’ I reply saying, ‘Fantastic! Just like before!’

Then there’s a message from Sandra Mansell, my quietly spoken spa owner client, whose photo my dad had a thing for. It just came in about twenty minutes ago.

 
Dear Celine,

Had a lovely time last night. Although it was NOT what I expected! Your father is an extremely adorable, charismatic man, and SO interesting! If only he were forty years younger! Please thank him again for a lovely evening. I was very flattered.

Sandra.