Chapter 32
32
I lie prone with hot tears coating my face, my mobile handset still a warm slab of glass in my hand from the recent call. A green light unexpectedly winks on the landline by my bed. For the second time inside twenty minutes tonight, I break my own rules and answer blind.
“Hello?” I say, blearily.
“Hi it’s me,” Fin says. “I didn’t wake you?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have a spare iPhone charger, would you? Mine’s frayed and the battery’s inching up by one percent a half hour.”
“Oh,” I sit up and glance at my open case. “Actually, yes. Think I do.”
“Mind if I come get it?”
I have to heave back a sob and say, “Sure,” which comes out as a squeak.
“Are you alright?” he says.
“Not really,” I gasp.
Fin pauses.
“I’m on my way.”
A soft tap at the door moments later and he’s outside, in his T-shirt and sweatpants. Even with hiking socks, it’s a good look for him.
“What’s the matter?” he says, as I hand him the charger. I try to speak and instead I burst into fresh tears, clamp a palm over my face. Fin steps into the room, shutting the door quietly behind him.
“Mark called,” I say, when I get the power of speech back. “My ex? In America. He’d seen something on Facebook today about Susie and called me to see how I was. He was so shocked, and his shock made me shocked all over again.”
Fin nods, face grave. “Yeah. Telling people, talking about it, is a series of aftershocks.”
“Yes! He was so sympathetic; it really did for me.”
During our conversation, I could hear the snuffling and occasional ragged cry of a newborn in the background of the conversation, an unknown female voice shushing. The connection had that slightly echoey, windy quality of long distance.
Standing in the anonymous surroundings of this grand hotel, it was what Susie and I used to call a “searchlight in the prison yard” moment. When you’re caught in the bright, unforgiving glare of an inspection you’ve not prepared for.
I didn’t want to be with Mark. Yet somehow, his being so distant in sunnier climes, and my being here in cold, lonely dark ones, amid such grief—it made me feel my life had comprehensively fallen apart, since I declined to share his. It felt like judgment, by a higher power.
“Mark’s memories of Susie caused me to think, you know, in a way I hadn’t, about how we all were.” I hear my tremulous voice in the quiet of a plush, noise-proofed hotel room. “About a time gone past. Racing around in our twenties, when things were hopeful and choices were unmade and Susie was with us. When I could’ve warned her not to get out of taxis early to smoke. It’s all gone,” I say, looking at Fin with streaming eyes, wiping my face ineffectually with my pajama sleeve. “It turns out that nothing worked out. My friends were the bit of my life I’d got right and now everything is sick and strange and fucked up forever.”
Finlay is frowning in concern but letting me talk.
“I feel like I got old overnight. I know how indulgent that sounds when Susie only got thirty-four years. All I have is pain and regret and a shit job where I type stupid things into boxes.”
“It won’t always be this way, Eve,” Fin says, quietly. “Life has harder parts.”
“What’s going to change for me?”
Fin smiles, sadly. “That’s largely up to you.”
“Yeah. I don’t have much faith in Future Me. Past Me is a twat.” I pause for a strangled breath. “I miss Susie so much,” I say. “I miss her so much, and I’ve spent this time being uselessly angry at her... and you were right, she was snooping with Ed, like I snooped on her reading that letter. Oh God... I just want her to be here to say sorry, so I can tell her I’m sorry. For everything. And that I love her so, so much and nothing matters except that fact. I can’t, I won’t speak to her ever again, Finlay. Game over.”
I sob openly, and Finlay puts his arms around me.
I make a decision, in the embrace, to lean into it. I’m not going to stanch my tears out of embarrassment. I’m not going to stop and choke this back into something feminine, and picturesque. I ugly heave-sob into his T-shirt until it’s wet enough to stick to his skin. He feels hard-bodied and lean under the fabric, a stark contrast to the squish of my chest. I’ve never been this physically close to an athletic type before. My partners, however narrow they looked when dressed, were always softly British-pudgy from beer and curries. Like me.
“I miss her too,” he says, into my hair.
“Really?” I look up at him. I blink and focus enough to see he has tears in his eyes. “I wasn’t sure if you did.”
“Yes,” he says, voice very low. “Very much. Not in the same way you do, I can’t miss a relationship I didn’t have. I’d been missing her for a long time. But it’s like I’ve lost a part of myself, my past. So many things only Susie shared with me. I already was pretty isolated, but now I realize, I wasn’t. Not like I am now. And like you, there are things between us that will always be unfinished. After the police called, I sat in silence, before the tears. I wasn’t ready. This wasn’t how it was going to end. I know you only saw the anger. I think there was still some love, underneath. Or a bond at least, whatever you’d call it. I know there was on my side. I found out I’d always been clinging hard to a notion of a point in the future when we could reconcile. The way things were between us wasn’t ever going to be forever, you know? And it turned out, it was.”
I’ve never heard Finlay, or indeed anyone, sound this raw.
“I’m sorry for being like this,” I say, in the deep silence that follows.
“Why?”
“I didn’t mean to suggest my loss is greater.”
“I know you didn’t. Come and sit down,” Finlay says, and guides me to the edge of the bed. “How about a cup of milky tea with a large sugar in it? It’s what my mum would suggest.”
“Sounds perfect,” I say, smiling. It actually does. I watch as Fin goes to fill the kettle in the bathroom, rustles around in the stash of sachets and plastic pots of UHT milk, clanks the china cups.
“Why have you got the television on, on mute?” he says, noticing the dancing picture in the gloom.
“I turned it on and I didn’t know how to turn it off.”
“Silent rugby at Twickenham is oddly hypnotic.”
Fin hands a cup to me, demonstrating good manners in twisting it so the handle is nearest. From his bearing, you’d definitely think he went to a posh school, not my school. He is a bit of a Gatsby.
“Thank you.”
“Want to be alone, or shall I stay for a while?” Fin says.
“Stay! If that’s OK.”
“Of course.”
Fin pours hot water onto a tea bag, dunks it and casts it aside, and walks to the bed. It’s so huge that he can lie on it and channel surf without it feeling as if we’re in bed together.
As I drink, I realize that as well as being emotionally unsettled, I was half drunk and dehydrated. Halfway down the cup, I feel significantly steadier.
Finlay holds the remote aloft and clicks through channels rapidly. For a few seconds, a male model with goatee and top knot in huge trousers swings down a catwalk and holds a jacket off his shoulder, before pulling it up, wheeling around, and stalking onward.
“Oh fuck’s sake. Where’s the off button on this thing?!” Finlay points the remote while pretend hammering at it in straight-faced ire, and I gurgle with delight both at the incident, and Fin having a sense of humor about it.
I have a tiny revelation: I like him. I’m not sure I trust him, but I do like him.
“Oh my God, can you do that?” I say.
“What, walk? Yes. Thank you.”
“Can I see a modeling picture? Are there any online?”
“No, too old, I’m afraid. Archive material. They were still using Box Brownie cameras.”
I gurgle some more. This was the brightener I needed.
“Did you do any famous ‘campaigns,’ as I believe they’re called?”
In laughter, I’ve unintentionally rolled closer to Finlay. Our arms are nearly touching, and neither of us are moving away again.
“Hmmmm, not telling you. You’ll look it up.”
“You said there’s no photos of you anywhere!”
“I was lying, as people do when they do not wish problematic women to know things.”
“Problematic, haha.”
He lifts his hips off the bed, pulls his phone out of his sweatpants pocket, turns it on, and presses a few buttons, careful to angle the screen away from me. “Think there was one for a whisky brand that was quite Mad Men , that I didn’t hate...”
My heart rate jumps a little, as it dawns on me he’s doing this not only to oblige me, but to impress me. I didn’t think for a second he’d actually show me anything, in my teasing. But I have more power than I realized.
Fin holds the phone, screen side to his chest.
“Alright, I’ll show you this, but the search term has been obscured for a reason !”
He barks this in a mock “schoolteacher when the bell rings” voice and I’m weak with giggling as he turns the phone toward me and I hold it steady, my hand over his, and examine the image. It has such an effect on me, I almost wish I hadn’t started this.
Finlay Hart in a slim-cut, dark brown sixties suit, one arm thrown over the back of a leather booth, the other holding a lowball glass with ice, staring straight down the lens with a come shag me then petulant challenge in his eyes. His hair is coal black and short; his skin looks lit from within.
“You look phenomenal ,” I breathe. “Seriously. I don’t know why you’re embarrassed. I’d have this shit framed.”
“If it’s cheered you up then maybe it was worth it,” he says, charmingly, repocketing his phone and sipping his tea.
“You’re an enigma, Finlay Hart,” I say.
Fin sets his cup down and turns his face to me, and we gaze at each other in the flickering moon glow of the television.
“I don’t want to be an enigma.”
“What do you want to be?”
“Isn’t that always the big question.”
We both pretend to watch people hanging out of rolled-down windows and firing guns in the police car chase through nocturnal Los Angeles streets in whatever film is playing, after the rugby. I don’t think either of us are thinking about it.
“Do you ever wonder what it would be like, to drop all... this, with someone?” Fin says, eventually. He makes a gesture up and down from his face to his shoulders and down to his waist that leaves me nonplussed. “The defenses and the deceptions and ways we have of impressing people. To fully be yourself, with no... no fear, I guess? Of how you’re coming over. No management of the impression you’re making. Total honesty.”
I get an unwelcome flashback to being astride Zack, getting ready to pretend to be someone who would please him.
“No,” I say. “Maybe I should.”
“For what it’s worth, if you could see yourself through my eyes, I don’t think you’d think you were a busted flush at this ‘living,’ Evelyn.”
“Really?”
“Really. I see a person who has everything going for her. The only thing you lack is self-belief.”
“Thank you,” I say. I parcel this incredible compliment up, mentally, to unwrap and fully enjoy after he’s gone. “You’re not doing badly yourself.”
“Hah. That’s what I told myself. It’s so strange being back here. I realize I left part of myself behind. Like pulling yourself out of a bear trap and half your leg not coming with you. You’re free, but you limp.”
“Why was it a bear trap?”
“I said had you ever wondered about dropping this.” He motions at himself again, smiling. “Not that I was ready to.”
“Haha. I don’t want to be an enigma , said the man who spoke in code.”
“I think what I really meant was: I don’t want to be an enigma to you.”
“Why?”
We’re side by side on a bed and he’s looking down at me, steadily. I’m accosted by an urge to pull his T-shirt upward. Wait wait wait... are we going to kiss... surely not? I’m very nervous, yet, I discover, receptive to this turn of events, looking at his outline in half light and being close enough to smell his shower gel. I lean in closer so our sides are touching, my right breast pressing against his arm. It’s as encouraging as I can be, using nerve endings, without seizing him. He’s still too intimidating for me to risk that.
“I should go to bed,” Fin says, pulling back and sitting up straighter, voice a notch louder.
“... OK.”
Finlay pauses, swings his legs over the side of the bed, and stands up.
“See you in the morning, Eve.”
He pads across the carpet and the door closes with a snap-click behind him. Well. That de-escalated quickly.
I turn the bedside light out and lie still, listening to the ambient, offstage noises of Edinburgh city center, late at night.
What was that about? Lots of intense staring, photos of him as Don Draper, I don’t want to be an enigma to you , and then, gone.
Maybe he wanted to know he could have me if he wanted.
I remember our first kiss when we were kids, my asking, Would you like to do it with me?
I got a direct answer in the affirmative, back then.
How have my skills with men degraded in the intervening twenty-five years?
As I’m drifting off to sleep, I think: In the actual Waldorf, surely reception would’ve had a spare iPhone charger? Did he want to see me again, tonight? Was he heading down here with—surely not—any amorous intention, and then I burst into tears? If so, why just up and go, later? No. That’s the cocktails telling me flattering lies.
I imagine relaying what he said about a reconciliation never being off the cards, to Susie. I picture her picking at her sleeve, face set in grumpy consternation, except the pout and the frown not for comic effect this time. She’d resent being asked to feel something that wasn’t ire, I think. The hurt and sadness would make a fleeting appearance.
Believe it when I see it, Eve.
Then she’d change the subject.