Same Time Next Week

Chapter 21

Alex was at the bar when Erin walked in; he’d just ordered a pint of cola and asked her what she would like. She had a half of the same. The pub was quite busy: quiz night, apparently. People were holding up pieces of paper and discussing answers from the snippets of conversation her ears gathered.

Alex sat down and again Erin thought what an attractive man he was, though the suit helped. She’d always thought men in dark suits and white shirts were hot. Bon had looked good in a suit. Dearest Bon. She wished he’d find someone to love. Or rather, she wished he’d let someone into his heart to love him. His portcullis was down but then he’d told her before, when they were taking things slowly at the beginning of their relationship, that he didn’t want to make any more mistakes – and then she’d become his biggest.

Erin sat back against the cushions and realised immediately that this had been a good idea. She felt lighter somehow, as if offloading some of what had built up inside her had shed some physical weight. It had been stuck there, like a giant fatberg in a drain.

‘I was interested to hear your story,’ said Alex. He had a voice that matched his attire, Erin thought: posh and sonorous. If he’d transformed into a bottle of wine, he’d have been a heavy red, a sagrantino.

‘My “half a story”,’ Erin corrected him. ‘I don’t think anyone would be ready for the rest.’

‘Oh?’ Alex’s features assumed a quizzical look.

‘It would have been too much for one sitting. I’d have sent you all off home suicidal.’

‘All of us in that group have tough stories,’ said Alex, picking up his pint glass. His hands were large enough to make it look like a half-pint.

‘What’s yours? I should catch up really, shouldn’t I?’ said Erin, adding quickly, ‘If you want to share.’

‘I was in a same sex couple,’ Alex began, which surprised her because her gaydar hadn’t been triggered one bit. ‘Although, I’ve had relationships with both men and women. I met Julian seven years ago at a Law Society dinner. He was a retired judge, much older than me; wonderful company, successful, cultured, intelligent, witty, dreadfully lost. He’d been a gay man all his life who never came out, just played the straight game for fear of being arrested or destroyed. He had two children and a loveless marriage. To cut a long story short, we fell in love and he tried everything to leave his marriage sensitively, respectfully but… well, he was cast out like an unclean demon. His children cut him out of their lives, just as he had always feared might happen, as did his sister and brother, but his friends didn’t and his reputation was a little dented maybe, but not demolished, however much his wife tried to bring that about. I wouldn’t have let anyone take advantage of him; he would have given everything away but he didn’t deserve to lose any more than he had.

‘His family and he never did reconcile, and that broke his heart. I’d like to think I mended it as best I could because we had three fabulous, fantastic, wonderful years together once he was finally free of that straitjacket he’d laced himself into. Then he got ill. I was more or less his nurse when we married, more friends than partners by then, but I loved him dearly. He knew the vultures would gather and they did. We reached out to his son and his daughter before he died, a last-ditch attempt at making his passing easier, but they remained intransigent and I hated them for that.

‘They, of course, made a ridiculous attempt to sue me for all manner of things when he’d gone, I dread to think how much money they threw on that stony ground. Near his end, Julian didn’t want them to have anything more than they already had from him – he’d been very generous to them in the past. If he had changed his mind, I’d have honoured it, whatever his will said. He trusted me to do everything to the letter: the funeral, the disbursements, including the bank transfer of a penny each to his sister and brother by way of gratitude for how they treated him. He got great enjoyment from imagining that scene and it was, it has to be said, every bit of entertaining as he thought it might be.’

Alex smiled. ‘I was holding his hand when he died; he just slipped away peacefully, he deserved nothing less than to depart with a calm, whispering breath. He left me a rich man. He said that he couldn’t take it with him so he was hoping I’d spend it and enjoy it; and like you, I feel a lot of conflicted emotion about adhering to the strict terms of his will. I was the love of his life, you see, and he knew my love for him was genuine… but smaller.’ He smiled fondly, his large brown eyes looking suddenly glassy.

‘It sounds to me as though you loved him… enough,’ said Erin.

‘I did love him, but I miss him as a friend more than anything. He was like a chandelier. He didn’t just light up a room, he flooded it.’

‘Carona was the opposite,’ said Erin. ‘She drained me, she sucked the light away and buried it in a black hole. What haunts me is that on the night she died, I had told her we were finished – again, but this time I meant it, I was at the end, the point of no return. She wanted me to go for a drive with her, to stop me packing my bags; to talk, she said, some place neutral. My instincts were screaming at me not to go. I wasn’t about to get in a car with her when she was in such a heightened emotional state. She did everything to try and make me: cried, pushed, pleaded, swore, but I’d had enough, it was over. I heard her tyres squeal as she left; I should have stopped her. I’ve even wondered if I knew what would happen and that’s why I didn’t.’

‘No,’ said Alex, cutting in quickly, ‘that’s your mind playing tricks on you. More likely, surely, that you just wanted some respite from her pressuring you.’

‘The police told me she was overtaking another car and drove into a bollard and do you know what – I believe, Alex, that if I’d been in the passenger seat, and there had been no car on the road to overtake, she’d have still driven into that bollard.’

A shiver rippled down her spine, like a eel wiggling in grease.

‘I’ve never told anyone that before. She once said to me that we should die together because she couldn’t live without me and she didn’t want me to live without her. She was being romantic, I suppose, but it struck me at the time as being an odd thing to say; it scared me a little. It was too much; she was too much. It was recorded as an accident, but I know it wasn’t. She planned to die that night with me or without me. I know how her mind worked. She wanted to haunt me for the rest of my life because that’s the only way she’d keep herself in it.’

Alex nodded, absorbing her words. ‘That’s a heavy burden,’ he said. ‘I can understand your head being a complete cabbage.’

‘Oh, it’s the full veg shop,’ said Erin with a humourless chip of laughter. Alex pointed to her empty glass. ‘Let me get you another.’

‘No, it’s my round.’ She stood and he held up an admonishing finger at her.

‘I’m much bigger, I can barge my way through.’

She watched him walk towards the bar, head and shoulders above most of the people clustered around it. She saw how he smiled at the bar girl when he gave her his order, pressed back the change she tried to give him. He gave off a warm vibe that she would have liked to have trusted, but then the last three years had screwed with her internal compass. She’d have to start building up her instinct from scratch.

‘Tell me about the priest,’ said Erin when he was seated again. ‘What was all that about a housekeeper?’

‘Father Paul’s is a very sad tale,’ said Alex. ‘He had a housekeeper for decades who he… liked.’

Erin raised her eyebrows. ‘Liked or liked ?’

‘Oh, I think the inference is very much that he liked her as a man as well as a priest. And really he should have confessed to his bishop and created some distance, but he didn’t. He would have left the priesthood for her but of course he never imagined that his feelings could have been reciprocated. She married, had a child, he was her source of comfort when that marriage ended. He never stopped loving her, he said. And when he was seventy-one last year and she was fifty-nine, she died. And on her deathbed, when he was attending her, giving her the last rites, her final confession was that she had always loved him and if he had given her one clue that he felt the same, she would have opened her arms to him.’

Erin was open-mouthed as she listened. ‘Oh my god, I don’t know if that’s beautiful or terrible. How desperately sad.’

‘If only one of them had made that leap to the other,’ said Alex. ‘Is it better for a love to keep burning on a low flame, or for it to blaze with the chance it might burn out?’

‘I’m really not the right person to ask,’ said Erin.

‘I think the latter.’ Alex nodded. ‘Always the latter. I think of Julian and how happy his last years were for taking his chance.’

Erin, scarred, would have leant towards the former. But a picture flashed in her mind of Bon and Sky. Two people who really needed to take their chance and make that leap; she was sure of it.