The Reunion (21 page)

Andrew threw the remaining log on the fire. ‘I’m so glad, Lilah, that you had someone there for you, that you have someone. I’m so glad that you’ve found someone who loves you as much as you need.’

She sniffed. ‘Me too.’ She smiled at him, opened her mouth as though she had something to say and then closed it again.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s not your fault,’ she said. ‘The way I am. I was always going to be like this.’

She turned her head towards him, big blue eyes lowered under long, wet lashes; up close like this you could almost see the bones underneath her skin. She slipped her hand into his, lightly scraping her teeth over her lower lip.

‘It wasn’t your fault. But I want to say, because of what she said – I mean, I want to tell my side. To you.’

‘What are you talking about, Lilah?’

‘Earlier. The thing with Natalie, that day in the pub.’

‘You don’t have to say anything to me, not now. It’s history now.’

‘Listen. My mum, she said that you were pulling away from me, that I wouldn’t have long. She said it and I told her it was bullshit. Only it stayed in my head. It was in my head whenever the three of us were together after that, it was in my head that morning at the pub. You were sitting next to Nat at lunch, she was telling you about a book she’d read. I don’t remember what it was now, but you were captivated.’

‘
Alias Grace
.’

‘What?’

‘The book she was talking about. It was
Alias Grace
, by Margaret Atwood.’

‘Jesus Christ, you remember the book.’ She shook her head. ‘I doubt you can remember a single thing I said to you that entire year.’

‘Lilah.’

‘There was a reason I needed a drink that morning. A reason I needed to do a line. And that’s all I did, you know, one line. I’m not justifying what I did, there is no justification, not for what I did then, not for what I did later. I didn’t think about it at the time, I don’t think I was even aware of it, not consciously, you know? But I was watching you falling in love with her. And I was hurting. Because –’ her voice broke a little – ‘how could you not, given the choice between her and me? How could you not love her, her spirit, her strength? She’s a thousand times stronger than I am. How could you not love what she is?’

‘Lilah, please, don’t, don’t think like that.’

‘I miss her, Andrew. I miss her so much. She broke my fucking heart.’

‘I know.’

‘No one, no man has ever hurt me the way she did. I loved her so much.’

‘I know.’

‘I miss her much more than I miss you.’

‘I know.’ He reached around her shoulders again, pulled her close to him, kissed her damp hair. She smelled of almonds and apples, delicious.

‘I hope you make her happy, Andrew. I hope you make each other happy.’

For a moment he couldn’t say anything, because there was a hard lump in his throat and he had the feeling that if he spoke, tears would come. He felt like they’d been coming all day. He felt exhausted. He let his body relax against hers, his head sinking to her sharp little shoulder.

‘She does. I mean, we do. Make each other happy. Or we did, anyway. We were happy, her and me and the girls.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Now, though. I don’t know. She’s so angry all the time. She could literally start an argument in an empty room. I mean it, sometimes I find her, pacing up and down, furious over some future imagined argument she’s going to have with the girls, or the gas company or the local council or some journalist who’s written a column in the newspaper. I don’t seem to be able to do anything about it. She’s so bloody disappointed with me all the time.’

‘That can’t be true,’ Lilah said, turning her face to his, lifting his chin with her fingers. ‘How could anyone ever be disappointed with you?’

Softly, she kissed him on the temple, and on the cheek, and on his lips.

15 January 1997

Dear Andrew,

This is the fourteenth time I’ve started this letter. I’m not joking. I’ve decided, no matter what, I’m finishing it, so if I ramble, forgive me.

I love you. You know that I do, that I have for a long time. That doesn’t change the fact that what happened this weekend was a mistake. And you know what I mean when I say that, not that it felt like a mistake, not that it felt wrong, because it didn’t, it felt right, perfectly right, as right as anything could feel.

You know what I mean, because you know me, better than anyone has ever known me. I cannot do this to Lilah, we cannot do this to Lilah. We won’t forgive ourselves, it will eat away at us, it will make us unhappy, and the thing I fear most of all is that somehow, though it doesn’t seem possible at the moment, that unhappiness will damage what we feel for each other. I can imagine few things worse than not loving you the way I do now, or feeling that you don’t love me.

I love you, but I cannot break Lilah’s heart.

Know that this is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.

I will always be yours.

Natalie

IT WAS A
terrible cliché, but Dan felt he was having a crossroads moment, and at these times, the appropriate thing was to absent oneself from the world for a period of quiet reflection. He would never admit it, but he was still too afraid to go outside to the barn by himself, never mind that the banging noise had been explained. Natalie had still said something about seeing a light out there, hadn’t she? No explanation for that other than there was a madman about. So quiet reflection would have to take place in the corner of the kitchen recently vacated by an extremely huffy Natalie. She’d gone upstairs to bed. Zac had completed whatever boy scout task he’d undertaken in the kitchen and had gone into the living room to sit with Jen.

The beep on his phone had been a text from Claudia, saying:
Don’t be angry baby. I tell him tomorrow. Promise. Love you
.

For a moment he was confused. What was he supposed to be angry about? Then he remembered, oh yeah, the thing about her having sex with her husband. That conversation seemed like it had taken place a very long time ago, and he found it difficult to care about it now; it was like something that had happened to someone else. This, he decided, was not a good sign. He should, by rights, still be burning with righteous anger, fired by jealousy. Why didn’t he give a shit?

This crossroads he was at didn’t really have anything to do with Jen. It would be easy to allow himself to think that it did, because he was here with her, because she still looked so beautiful and she still had that way of looking at him which made him feel as though he had a metal hook in his heart and she held a line attached to it and she could tug, tug, tug, any time she liked. But if he was honest with himself, this feeling wasn’t completely new.

Zac came lumbering back into the kitchen. Dan groaned, louder than he’d intended.

‘You OK there?’ Zac asked. He was so solicitous. Why was he so solicitous?

‘Fine, thank you,’ Dan replied, trying to keep the edge of irritation out of his voice.

‘You sure?’

‘I’m all right, Zac. I’m just… Well. Girl trouble.’ The moment the words left his lips, he regretted them. Why was he telling Zac?

‘Ah, right. The actress. The married actress.’

‘Mmm-hmmm.’

‘I went out with an actress once. She was on
Casualty
, or
Holby City
or something.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah. She was mental. Is yours mental?’

‘No. She isn’t mental.’

To his chagrin, Zac sat down across the table from him. ‘Has she changed her mind? About leaving her husband?’

‘No.’

‘So what’s the problem?’

Oddly, Zac’s questioning style, utterly lacking, as it was, in finesse, took Dan to the crux of the matter.

‘It’s me. I feel… honestly? I feel like I may have made a huge mistake. Not in being with her, but in suggesting to her, persuading her, even, that she ought to leave her husband. It’s a big responsibility, you know.’

‘Breaking up someone’s marriage, you mean?’

Dan sighed. ‘No. I mean, yes. Well. It’s complicated.’

‘How so?’

‘OK. You’re making me sound like a dickhead, and I’m not. I didn’t get into this lightly, OK? I’ve thought about it, long and hard. For ages, I agonised over this.’

‘Ages.’

‘Yes, ages. We met… I don’t know, five months ago.’

‘Five months? That long?’

‘Just… listen, OK. I saw her in a film last year.
The Hunger
. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it.’ Dan didn’t imagine that Zac was a fan of German art house. ‘Very interesting, very erotic. She was phenomenal and I just couldn’t get her out of my head. When I was writing
The Lost Girl
– that’s the film we’ve just finished shooting – I wrote the character of Ofelia with her in mind. I contacted her agent and persuaded her to audition. Not that she really needed to, of course, because I’d written the part for her. But I wanted to be sure, really sure. And it was just as I’d imagined it, imagined her. She was perfect.’ Just thinking about it now made his breath quicken. ‘There was this instant, fierce attraction between us. Undeniable. Obviously mutual, right from the start. But we didn’t do anything. Partly out of respect for her marriage, but also because of the work.’ Dan closed his eyes, thinking back to that time, all those torturous hours spent together, close enough to touch, often actually touching (he was known as quite a physical director), the long nights discussing the script and rehearsing, the ache, the physical agony he felt, wanting her so badly. He shook it off. ‘It wasn’t until the end of shooting, when we realised that we weren’t going to see each other every day any more, that’s when we realised that we had to be together.’

‘Sounds… great,’ Zac said. ‘Hot. The whole thing sounds really hot.’
It sounds hot?
Dan’s shoulders slumped. What on earth was he doing talking to this man? What insights could he possibly offer? ‘Working together, wanting each other, sneaking around… sounds exciting. Doesn’t really sound like real life, though.’

Dan shook his head, gave a wry little laugh. He tried to think of an appropriate way to demonstrate to Zac that what he had with Claudia was very real indeed, but he faltered. Infuriatingly, he was struck by the notion that Zac had a point. It didn’t sound like real life. Even as he was telling the story, talking about her, he realised how much it sounded just like that – a story. With a beginning, a middle, an ending. What was the ending going to be? Happy ever after? He couldn’t quite picture it. In fact, if he were honest, whenever he pictured Claudia, whenever he imagined the two of them together, they were never in his apartment in London making spaghetti bolognese, they were never walking on Hampstead Heath or going to the cinema. They were always in a hotel room or at the airport, never at home, always elsewhere.

Enlightening as this conversation with Zac had been, it wasn’t helping. If anything, it was propelling Dan towards a state of panic. He’d felt this way before: over the past few weeks a sensation of real terror had visited him in the night, startling him awake and keeping him there, even as he lay by Claudia’s side, her ivory limbs tangled in the sheets, blonde hair flung over the pillow, pale lips just slightly parted, perfection. Lately he found himself terrified, and the thing that was terrifying him was the final scene of
The Graduate
where Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross get onto the bus, breathless from their dash from the church where Ross has just left her husband-to-be at the altar, and then they just sit there, not speaking, uncertainty writ large all over their faces, and you know what they’re thinking. Dan knew what
he
was thinking anyway… He was thinking, Jesus Christ, what the fuck have I done? So I’ve got her, she’s mine now. Now what do I do?

Zac was looking at him, waiting for him to say something.

‘I need a beer,’ he said, and Zac obliged, fetching them a couple from the fridge. Not quite cold, but cold enough. ‘I don’t know what to do,’ Dan said lamely.

‘If you’re not sure, you should tell her. Don’t let her leave her husband if you’re not sure.’

He was right. The enormous himbo boy scout was completely right. But how would Claudia take that? She wasn’t big on rejection, she wasn’t used to it. If she sensed him backing away from her, that would be the end of it, he was sure; the affair would be over, the flame extinguished, never to be rekindled. Could he be without her? He was visited by a vision almost as frightening as the
Graduate
scenario: himself, all alone in a thousand-pound-a-night hotel room in Paris on Christmas Day.

His fingers moved over the touchpad of his phone. He watched it light up, but he didn’t do anything. He felt paralysed, immobilised, in limbo somewhere between the frying pan of commitment and the fire of chronic, indefatigable loneliness.

‘You come from a big family, don’t you?’ he asked Zac.

‘Two big brothers, one little sister,’ Zac replied. ‘How d’you know?’

‘You just have that way about you. People who come from big, happy families have a certain… confidence, I find.’