The Love Market (25 page)

When I hang up, I sit down on the end of my bed, and all I can do is smile.

~ * * * ~

In the week, I phone Kim and break some good news. ‘I have another match for you. He’s in the music business. Lives up here but flies down to London. He’s got a flat down there.’

Andrew Flemming is the type of man Kim should be drawn to. He’s an Ideas man, who has an atypical career, is at the top of his game, is incredibly interesting, entertaining, and he’s not at all bad looking.

‘He’s thirty-nine,’ I tell her. ‘And he’s not opposed to meeting a woman in her mid-forties. I’m going to aim for next Thursday night if that works with you. But I have to tell you, if you don’t like him, I have an awful lot of women who will. I’m giving you a chance first.’

‘Hmm,’ she says. ‘I’m going to try really hard not to blow it.’

I then phone Andrew and tell him I am setting him up with a very pretty public relations executive. Being in the music industry, Andrew is used to dealing with ‘characters.’ And I have to remember that none of the men I have sent her out with have disliked her.

Yet.

~ * * * ~

On Saturday night, Aimee and I rent a DVD, and when it goes off we have the talk. I tell her that Patrick has invited us to Canada.

By the time I get to the bit about me having got in touch with him and we’ve been corresponding, she is already rolling her eyes. ‘Mum I already know that you went to see him in London.’

I gawp at her. ‘How do you know that? Did Aunt Jacqui say something?’

‘Not really. Just that you’d gone to see an old friend.’

‘I went for a conference!’

She gives me that look again.

I study her waif-like upper-body with its vest under the T-shirt, and tiny mounds of breasts, her indigo toe and fingernails. Since she kissed Rachel’s boyfriend, she hasn’t really talked about boys any more. Except to tell me that Rachel is in love with Edward in
Twilight
, but Aimee thinks he’s lame.

‘Well, really, in many ways that’s all he is. And I told him you wouldn’t want to go. That you’d have no interest in seeing a big, exciting Canadian city. You don’t want to go to the Canadian lakes and see black bears and wolves, and go boating, and have picnics and barbeques. You’d far rather just hang out at boring old home for the summer, with me and your dad and all your fantastic best friends who are now back in your life.’

‘Why’d you tell him that?’ She stares at me like I’m from outer space.

~ * * * ~

My overriding memory of Greece is of sitting in a fish tavern across the table from my father and his Marie—his bimbo. She, with her hair in a messy up-knot, black sunglasses on her head, and a black kaftan-style shirt over her bikini. She dragged on a cigarette in a way that said she knew secrets about life that I would never know. She was twenty-seven to my dad’s fifty-three. The most gorgeous thing I’d ever seen, and I couldn’t fathom what she saw in my dad. Until this holiday, I’d esteemed my father to be greater than great. Even his dumping us was something that people like him, who were too good for the rest of us, did. Yet here he was in his acrylic jumper, with his furrowed forehead, and his tall stories I’d heard a million times before. And there was I with my bleached “eighties” hair, peering from behind my long fringe that felt like a wad of toilet paper stuck on there, absorbed in my own personal peep show. My dad could not stop kissing her. Slow, reverent snogs that looked difficult somehow, like two people trying to become unstuck from quick-dry cement. From the other side of a plate of fried calamari, I watched his hand fondle her breast. I remember her laughing, and my father’s tongue shockingly sliding in and out of her mouth, and my eyes widening, horrified of what might be coming next, and how I thanked God when she brushed him off to smoke another fag.

I was never going to fall in love. I was never going to be kissed. If you took those two small details out of life, everything else felt like it was going to be simple.

Somehow I will have to manage this trip carefully, if Aimee ever agrees to it. I refuse to ever leave my daughter with that view of life.

I’m tidying my room and folding my jeans when I find my dad’s letter to Sandra in the pocket. I had forgotten that I was supposed to give it to her. I sit down on the end of the bed. He has sealed it with a shiny silver sticker, round like a bright ten-pence piece. Worried what’s in it, I open it and read:

Beautiful Sandra…

There is absolutely no truth to the rumour that, following her intensive search to find love, Sandra will now fly away with Anthony to spend a fabulous two weeks in the Maldives…

In truth, I write this to thank you for your company at dinner. If you ever wish to go out again, to continue our conversation, you have only to let me know. But failing this ever materialising, I hope I can captivate you on an entirely different level. The offer to paint you is one I did not make lightly. So rarely am I moved by my subjects these days, that I cannot help but think you and I can somehow benefit each other.

If you would agree to sit for me, I shall repeat to you here, my phone number. 542-1265.

Yours,

Ancient Anthony

~ * * * ~

Ancient Anthony.

I go downstairs, find another envelope to put it in, and pop out to the post office.

When I come back I have an email from Lindsay Walsh, the journalist at
Hers.

Dear Celine,

Have you had a chance to speak with your sister? When is a good time for me to phone? Prefer some time this week . LW.

~ * * * ~

‘There isn’t a good time,’ Jacqui says, when I ring her. ‘I’m extremely busy at work. I don’t think I can do it, Celine.’

I park on the edge of my settee cushion, and stare at the space between my feet. ‘You know, stop me and tell me I’m wrong any time, but I’m getting the impression you don’t want to help me out with this.’

Silence. Then, ‘I don’t want to be involved in the article, Celine, if you must know.’

I pluck at the threads on my cut off jean shorts—the ones Aimee made me buy because she said I needed to be trendier. ‘But you are the article—I mean, part of it. The whole angle for the story was how there are two matchmakers in the family. Remember? Without you, Patrick wouldn’t be back in my life and the journalist wouldn’t be wanting to write about me.’

She sighs heavily. I am so confused by her reaction that I have a headache. ‘I just don’t get it. I don’t know why you’re being like this.’

‘Because it’s not me they should be interviewing!’ she suddenly says, sounding exasperated. ‘I didn’t want to tell you this, Celine. But now I’ve obviously got no choice, have I?’ She sighs again while I hang there in suspense.

‘It wasn’t me who got you back in touch with Patrick. It was Mike.’

‘Mike?’

I laugh, a short burst. Then I’m struck dumb. ‘Did you say it was Mike?’ I say, after a few moments.

‘Yes. Mike emailed Patrick. I’m sorry. I wasn’t supposed to tell you. That’s why I let you just go on believing it was me.’

‘Hang on… Are you being serious?’ I contemplate this. ‘My God, you are! Mike emailed Patrick? But the email was sent from my computer. Mike never…’

‘Had access? Yes he did. When you went to Manchester and he came over. Remember?’

The confusion lifts, and I do remember, vaguely. Didn’t he tell me that he took them out to dinner?

‘He came to pick us up. I invited him in because he was a bit early and Aimee had been having a clothing crisis, and she wasn’t quite ready. He was downstairs. I was upstairs with Aimee, helping her choose something. I suppose he must have gone on your computer…’

‘Why on earth would he do that, Jacq? He’s got no right…!’ I stand up and walk around the room, in disbelief. ‘So—hang on—he knows that Patrick and I met? That he’s been up here? That he’s been in our house?’

‘Not from me he doesn’t,’ she says quickly. ‘When he told me that he’d emailed he said he didn’t want to know anything about what might happen. He’d just done it and that was it.’

‘But why would he even tell you?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe like all of us, we need someone to tell. Or maybe it was his way of telling me why he believed your marriage broke up—because there was someone else in the background. Who knows? Anyway, he said it quite matter-of-factly. Didn’t make a big thing of it. It was the first time I’d ever heard Patrick’s name come out of Mike’s mouth, but the way he told me, it was obvious he knew that I knew all about him. I’m sure he knew we’ve talked about him many times. I’m sure Mike knew a lot more than you ever gave him credit for.’

I am stunned.

‘But if I were a betting woman,’ she continues, ‘I’d say that he probably suspects that’s why you went to London, yes.’

I look at Mike’s photo on the shelf above the table. His eyes again, watching me. Was this Mike’s grand plan? To leave me and then reunite me with the one he thought I loved more?

‘Why would he do it, Jacq?’ I say again. ‘I just don’t get it.’

‘I don’t know.’ She sounds equally dismayed. ‘I suppose you’ll have to ask him.’

~ * * * ~

I arrange to meet Mike in the pub, at the far end of Tyne Green Park. To get him to come, I told him I need to talk to him about Aimee. It’s a dark day but dry when I set out. But by the time I am half way along the riverside trail it starts throwing it down. In my haste to leave the house, I didn’t bring an umbrella. Hurrying, my flipflops make small noises like trapped birds. Within moments my toes are caked in muck, and my white dirndl skirt soaked. My mobile rings.

‘Where are you?’ he says. ‘I’m at the pub and you’re not.’

‘I’m nearly there,’ I tell him. ‘I decided to walk instead of drive. But I didn’t bring a brolly.’ I push back hair that’s dripping styling product into my eyes. I usually run this park, so have no perception of the time it takes to actually just walk it. For some odd reason I remember Aimee getting lost in here when I brought her, when she was about five. One minute she was there, then I bumped into a neighbour and got chatting, and when I looked, she was gone. I can still remember my feet pounding the grass, my heart hammering, like I was going to die; my head dizzy from dodging trees and trying to watch my step. How I was calling for her, and thinking
what if I can’t find her? If she just disappears
?
If someone takes her?
Then, completely unexpectedly, Mike came round the corner with her in his arms. He had decided, on the spur of the moment, to come out and join us.

‘I’ll come and meet you,’ he says now.

‘No, stay there. I’m not far. There’s no sense in us both getting wet,’ I say, but he has already hung up.

I start running. My clothes are stuck to my body now, and I am cold. Nothing like you would expect to feel in mid-summer. Only in this part of the country where the dampness cuts through when the sun isn’t there to lift it. I stop to wipe my smarting eyes, wondering how I’m ever going to go into the pub looking such a mess.

When I stop rubbing my eyes and open them again, Mike is standing right there, about fifty feet away, on the gravel path. A lone figure, against a background of tall trees, cold river, and iron rain.

He has on his light blue skinny jeans, with his white running shoes, and his old beige blazer thrown on top of a white open-necked dress shirt, that he hasn’t bothered tucking in, as though he threw it on quickly. He is holding his big black Blaze FM umbrella.

‘Hiya,’ he says. ‘God, you’re drenched. Look at you!’

As I walk up to him, my breath coming hard from running, his eyes drop down the front of me, then he holds out his umbrella for me to come under.

I take a step or two closer, so I am sheltered. The rain does an irregular tiptoe on the nylon above our heads. He looks pale, and traumatized somehow. His eyes comb over my dripping wet hair, over my face. He smells of fresh air. There are beads of rain in the quiff of his hair.

‘Mike,’ I say, hugging my arms about my body.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks.

I can’t go on for a few moments, have to look away from him. A family of starlings fly back and forth between two trees. There is gravel in my flipflops, small stones sticking to the soles of my feet. ‘Why did you email Patrick?’ I look at him now.

His expression doesn’t change much. But in the darkness of his face, I suddenly see him, as maybe I never have: as someone easily hurt. ‘Oh,’ he says. ‘So she told you.’ He nods. ‘Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.’

‘She did. But not for the reasons you might think.’ I don’t feel like getting into the magazine article thing now. I am shivering and crave to be dry and warm. ‘But why Mike? What on earth made you do it?’