Miss You

NINE Gus

“You’ve struck gold!”

My friend Marcus and I, sitting at an outside table in the beer garden of the Gloucester Arms, watched Lucy, in a denim miniskirt and pink sleeveless T-shirt, disappear inside the pub to get another round.

For some unfathomable reason—Marcus didn’t say this, but I knew it was what he was thinking—this near-perfect example of femininity had fallen for me. His undisguised approval made me even prouder of my girlfriend, not just because of her pretty face and great body but because of the attentive way she’d been drawing him out about his course and his life in Bristol, where he was reading law. His university experience seemed to have a lot to do with debating societies and drinking. The tongue-tied boy I knew had become almost chatty in response to her questions.

After depositing two more pints in front of us, Lucy left us to spend the evening together. She’d arranged to go to a movie with a couple of her girlfriends.

“I’m sure you’ve got lots of catching up to do,” she said.

We both watched her walking away, her hair bright gold in the early-evening sunshine.

Inside the pub, the World Cup semi-final was on a big screen, the air suddenly full of cheering. We craned our necks to see who had just scored a goal. One-all.

“Do you think it’ll go to penalties?” Marcus asked.

“It’s a possibility.”

“Brazil have to win, don’t they?”

“You’d think so.”

Our friendship was founded on shared reticence rather than conversation. Both more naturally inclined to observe than participate, we’d met at the back of the dinner queue our first day at boarding school, sized each other up and discovered that we were both Arsenal supporters, although we’d quickly learned not to celebrate that allegiance in public. At our school, football was for wusses; real men played rugby. On the field, my speed and Marcus’s skills helped us avoid the worst of the mauling. In the dormitory and showers, we looked out for each other and weighed in on each other’s behalf. The fact that my big brother was Head Boy that year had offered me no protection from random violence. Ironically, Ross was always an enthusiastic proponent of the what-doesn’t-kill-you-makes-you-stronger philosophy. As in most male friendships, there was always an element of friendly rivalry between Marcus and me. Assessing him with the benefit of a year’s distance, I suspected I’d grown up more than he had. As sixth-formers, we’d envisaged wild student parties where females would roll into bed with us and roll out again in the cold light of morning when they saw the mistake they’d made. Now I started sentences with “we” and knew about clitoral stimulation, and not just from my textbooks. I gathered that Marcus’s Ibiza relationship hadn’t been a great success, and though he’d slept with a couple of girls since, he had yet to find a serious girlfriend and still called sex “shagging.”

Medical students are renowned for playing as hard as they work, but Lucy and I were ridiculously middle-aged. Almost every Saturday morning, I awoke to find her handing me a mug of coffee before squeezing back into the narrow bed and giving me a kiss that tasted of toothpaste. Lucy did sex like she did most things, with a lot of thorough research. All the magazine articles she had read on the subject advised talking openly about what you liked, so we had become fairly expert at giving each other pleasure. Occasionally, Lucy asked if I had any fantasies, and I always said I was happy with things just the way they were because I was sure that was the correct answer.

Obviously, I didn’t tell Marcus any of this.

For his second year, Marcus had made plans to rent a house with a bunch of guys from his hall; Lucy and I were going to be sharing a flat.

“So, it is lurve?” Marcus asked a little wearily.

Lucy and I called sex “making love.” We were allowed to say things like “I love how that feels” or “I loved this evening” or even “I love you when you’re funny/silly/serious.” However, the words “I love you” on their own remained unspoken, as if they had the power to cast an irrevocable spell on us. Once, I thought I heard her breathe the words over a particularly undulating orgasm, but I wasn’t sure and could hardly ask for clarification.

“Whatever ‘lurve’ means!” I replied, trying to show Marcus that I was cool about it.

The truth was that I didn’t know if I loved Lucy. I liked her enormously. She was very easy to be with and cared about me much more than anyone else in my life ever had, noting things I said, even tiny inconsequential things like preferring crunchy peanut butter to smooth. Perhaps that was a girl thing? I didn’t know because she was my first girlfriend. I felt constantly surprised and fortunate that she was interested in me. Was that love? In the ensuing silence, Marcus and I both took long, serious gulps of our lager.

“I haven’t told Lucy about Ross,” I suddenly confessed.

I couldn’t work that one out either. Was it really because I didn’t want her to get all sympathetic and insist on talking about it? Or was I harboring some irrational fear that Ross still had the power to ruin the things I treasured, like my selection as Lower School goalkeeper, which I’d had to relinquish when he dislocated my shoulder, and Toffee, my guinea pig, whose hutch he’d “accidentally” left open?

Marcus considered the statement for so long I was beginning to wonder whether he’d actually heard. Then he finally said, “No reason to, I suppose.”

The relief was immense.

“A new chapter for you.”

“Yes.”

“Ross was such a psycho,” said Marcus. “RIP, obviously.”

The match had gone to penalties.

Conversation was suspended while we watched Brazil go through to the final.

“You still playing squash?” I asked.

“Yup. You still running?”

“Every morning.”

My usual route—and it was important to have a usual route so that thinking didn’t intrude on the meditative vacuum that running delivered—took me down through the grimy main streets of Camden, up Parkway, and through the gate into the quiet paradise of Regent’s Park. In winter, frost on the grass, a pinkish tinge to the dawn sky, the delicate structures of trees, blurred by my misty breath, gave the landscape the feel of an Impressionist painting. In spring, I found myself noticing smaller-scale beauty like the stone urns, spilling over with tulips, in the formal Italian gardens near the Euston Road, and the wax-like petals of magnolia blossoms. Summer brought swags of roses on the pergolas of the Inner Circle, which my route circumnavigated before a long straight sprint across the fields, past the giraffe houses of the zoo, over the canal and back across the lower slope of Primrose Hill.

On sunny days, cafe owners would be setting out tables and chairs along the wide, curving street which took me back to the railway bridge. It was one of those chichi areas of London where traditional businesses could no longer compete with the demand for coffee and fresh, delicious food. Over the course of the year, I’d watched a launderette being gutted, renovated and reinvented as an Italian restaurant.

One day the owner, who’d done most of the work himself, was struggling on a ladder as I passed. I stopped and offered to help steady the sign, which said PIATTINI. Since then we’d exchanged a friendly buon giorno! as he chalked up the day’s specials on a folding blackboard. The descriptions were unadorned—polenta con funghi trifolati, salsiccia al finocchio, granita alla mandorla—the smells filtering out from the kitchen, mouth-watering.

The day I noticed the words WAITER REQUIRED above the menu, I ran past, as usual, then stopped, turned, and ran back. Salvatore gave me an evening’s trial, after which he paid me for the hours I’d worked and asked if I’d like a job. I think I was probably prouder of that achievement than I was of passing my first-year exams.

“So you’re staying in London for the summer?” Marcus asked.

“That’s the plan.”

The flat Lucy had found for us became available at the end of the academic year, and now that I had a job, I wouldn’t have to go home at all.

“How are your parents doing?”

“OK, I think.”

I called them every two weeks or so. Since I was last home, my father had re-tiled the downstairs cloakroom and installed a movement-sensitive security system, both projects, I suspected, designed to keep his mind from thinking about more intractable problems. My mother had taken up quilting. When they asked me if everything was going well, I said yes. The only way I could imagine of giving them any small pleasure was to qualify as a doctor. A photo of me in a mortar board on the living-room mantelpiece would be something to show their friends. Left to my own devices, I probably would have foundered under the pressure of the course, but Lucy made sure we both stuck to the work and helped me with my reflections on practice.

“It’s not a philosophy essay,” she said, when I was making a meal of it. “All they want to know is what you could have done better. You’re training to cure sick people, not change their lives.”

“What about you?” I asked Marcus. “Do you have any plans?”

“I was thinking of Interrailing,” Marcus said, with a shrug that made me realize that was why he’d come to see me. For a moment I was tempted by the thought of going back to Italy, enjoying the holiday we hadn’t managed the previous year. But the need to earn my own money was more pressing. Though my parents never mentioned the cost of my education, I was determined to be as independent as I could.

Lucy gave Marcus a hug when we saw him off at Paddington station. As he turned to offer me a formal handshake, I half wished men were allowed to hug too. I had male friends at college, like Toby, although we’d seen each other less since Lucy and I got together, and Jonathan, the serious guy I’d met on the interview day, who I sometimes went for a drink with when he wasn’t playing chess, but there was no one who knew me like Marcus. Nash was the closest I got to a confidante, but my friendship with her made Lucy uncomfortable. The most critical thing I ever heard Lucy say about Nash was that she was “a bit much”; Nash was far more explicit, especially when drunk, accusing me of settling for the easy option of someone who didn’t challenge me, to which my answer was, “And your problem with that is?”

Which riled her all the more, although, somehow, we always ended up laughing a lot.

The flat was on the seventh floor of a big block on a council estate between Camden and Euston Road. The location, only ten minutes’ walk from the hospital, was convenient, and we had a view north and eastwards over the mainline out of Euston, and beyond towards Camden, Gospel Oak and Hampstead Heath. At first, the grim, graffitied concrete wasteland felt forbidding, but once we became familiar with the routes in and out, it didn’t feel quite so much like a war zone.

Lucy and I took one of the bedrooms, her friends Harriet and Emma, the other two. Until university, I’d never been exposed to the company of women, but found it generally more agreeable than the all-male environment at school. There, my reluctance to join in initiation rituals, such as tea bagging, where you took another man’s scrotal sac in your mouth, had been condemned as effeminacy; in the flat, I only had to be watching Final Score on Saturday afternoon to be considered unequivocally male.

We all shared household duties, with me volunteering to take the rubbish down (before learning how often the lift would be broken) and do the communal shopping once a week. I took to the role, searching out the cheapest places for staples like milk and toilet paper, trawling Inverness Street market for bargains on Saturday afternoons when the stalls were packing up.

Under the tutelage of Stefania, Salvatore’s wife and the chef at Piattini—where I continued working at weekends—I developed an interest in cooking.

“How many tomatoes can four people eat?” Lucy asked when I’d arrived back with a crate that cost me a pound.

But she had to admit that roasted with a little olive oil, they made a delicious pasta sauce, especially with a little Parmesan cheese grated over the top.

I began to look forward to the methodical rhythm of washing and chopping vegetables, stirring, sipping, tasting and creating something delicious, like ribollita, from a few raw ingredients. It was a good way of winding down at the end of a day of hospital rounds, cheaper and more nutritious than buying ready meals or takeout, and it was something I could do for all my flatmates to compensate for their efficiency with all the other household chores, like vacuuming and cleaning the bathroom, which were done before I’d got around to noticing they needed to be.

In October, when my parents, who were curious about my “living arrangements,” announced that they were coming up to London for the day and asked me to book a restaurant for Sunday lunch—“somewhere decent, you couldn’t afford yourself”—I surprised them by instead serving porchetta stuffed with fennel and garlic, accompanied by rosemary roast potatoes and a crisp salad.

“This is really very good, Lucy!”

My father was doing that embarrassing-dad thing of trying to flirt with her.

“It’s all down to Gus,” she told him. “I’m useless in the kitchen!”

“Gus?” said my mother. “Well, this is a surprise. A lovely surprise!”

It wasn’t clear whether she meant my name, the evidence of my heterosexuality, or my cooking. The swell of childish pride I felt in finally demonstrating a talent Ross had never displayed was immediately followed by a wave of dread that she would make the comparison out loud instead of inside her head. She didn’t. The day was a success. But not one I wanted to repeat.

“Your parents are nice,” Lucy said afterwards.

Your parents. I’d introduced them as “my mother” and “my father” rather than Caroline and Gordon. I wasn’t even sure whether Caroline and Gordon would have been acceptable to them.

“Do you think they liked me?” Lucy asked.

I didn’t know if they even liked me.

“I’m sure they did. They’re just not the type who express affection very much.”

I’d never really thought about why that was. Perhaps as only children themselves, they hadn’t needed to; perhaps as people who had risen to the middle class from fairly ordinary backgrounds, they weren’t sure how they were supposed to behave.

“You’re not like them,” Lucy said.

“That’s a relief,” I said, glad that her curiosity had been satisfied without the need to take her home to our chilly, lifeless house.

Lucy’s parents were used to their daughters having boyfriends and treated me with exactly the right balance of fondness and suspicion. Lucy’s mother, who instructed me to call her Nicky straight away, was warm and hospitable. When cooking, she always made a point of asking my opinion about how much spice to put in a curry or how long to give a piece of meat. When I jumped up to help clear the table, she’d say how nice it was to meet a man who didn’t think that washing up was putting the saucepans in the sink and leaving them there to soak. Lucy’s father, on the other hand, never told me to call him Bill. His circumspect frown always made me behave slightly clumsily, trailing my sleeve in my cereal bowl or tripping over a rake when I was helping him clear the leaves from the lawn.

Theirs was a more informal household than I was used to, where you could sleep in on Sunday if you wanted and make yourself toast at any time of day. When Nicky asked me if I’d like to join them for Christmas, I leapt at the invitation with almost unseemly enthusiasm, telling my parents that I was working in the restaurant until late Christmas Eve, making it impractical to visit them, which was actually true, although I probably could have got the time off.

Lucy’s family did a jokey Secret Santa before lunch. My gift was a pair of those huge soft-toy slippers in the shape of Gromit; the one I picked out for Lucy’s older sister Helen, after much deliberation, was a soap-bubble-making machine, which delighted her little girl, Chloe. Helen was the sister I was least keen on. She had that cool, detached GP’s way of appraising you that made you feel as if she’d seen symptoms she didn’t much like the look of. When I’d told her once, only half-joking, that I didn’t think I’d want to be a GP because I couldn’t see myself sitting on my own and being confident enough to diagnose even a common cold, she informed me, humorlessly, that most colds are caused by a virus and there isn’t much you can do about them except advise the patient to keep well hydrated until their immune system does its job.

“But what about the one in a thousand cases that might turn to meningitis?”

“We all worry about that.”

“The thing is,” I said, “I can’t see myself ever able to make a decision about the nine hundred and ninety-nine—”

“You will when you’ve got thirty of them sitting reading dog-eared copies of Hello! in the waiting room,” she said, briskly. “Never a good idea to over-think these things.”

The middle sister Pippa was much more fun: slightly flustery and inclined to take offence, but also quick to show affection. Compared to the other two, she was a bit of a rebel. Having suffered from bulimia in her teenage years—in a family full of doctors, this is the sort of thing they talked about at the table—she now kept herself stick-thin by smoking surreptitious cigarettes at the end of the garden. She was the “needy” one, according to those labels families often hang around their children’s necks.

“What does that make Lucy, then?” I’d asked Nicky when I felt our relationship was well enough established to get involved in such conversations.

“Lucy’s the no-trouble-at-all one,” she told me.

“Probably because I’ve always had everyone looking after me,” Lucy said.

“See what I mean?” said Nicky.

In truth, Lucy could be a bit needy too. For instance, when I recounted anecdotes about the customers at Piattini, she’d always say, with a little moue, “I think you like that job better than being a medical student.”

And I’d have to assure her, no, I like being a medical student (code for: I like being with you); it’s just that, in a restaurant, you get a glimpse into the lives of all kinds of people with all kinds of different stories.

“You do at the hospital,” she pointed out.

“Yes, but they’re all ill!”

Lucy often thought I’d said something funny when I hadn’t actually intended to.

We ate our Christmas lunch in the middle of the day with paper crowns on our heads, passing gravy and bowls of vegetables up and down the table, helping ourselves to cranberry sauce straight from a jar. I pictured my parents in the silent dining room dutifully eating their smoked-salmon starter with the correct cutlery and felt a horrible pang of guilt.

After lunch, the adults sat in the living room around the roaring fire opening our proper Christmas presents. After a lot of indeterminate searching, I’d found what I thought was the perfect gift for Lucy. We’d been to the Christmas fancy-dress party at the Union dressed as Sandy and Danny from Grease. Lucy looked great with her hair pulled up into a ponytail, wearing a fifties dress with a white plastic belt that she’d found in a charity shop. Everyone said so. When I saw a real fifties handbag on the arm of a mannequin wearing a similar dress in the window of a shop selling American vintage clothes on Neal Street, I’d paid more than I’d budgeted for it.

Without the dress to give it context, however, the white handbag looked more junk than vintage, the purse clasp at the top slightly rusty, the plasticized fabric brittle and cracked at the corners. As I struggled to explain my thought process, Pippa was unable to contain a little burst of laughter and Helen looked at me as if I’d brought in something nasty on my shoe.

“I love it!” said Lucy, loyally, carefully returning it to its wrapping and handing me the heavy package with my name on the gift tag.

Inside was a sketchpad, some drawing pencils and a wooden box of watercolors.

It was a gift that exactly reflected her generous and practical nature. Lucy wasn’t interested in art herself—at the couple of exhibitions we’d been to together, she’d very quickly started glancing at her watch—but she knew I liked painting and was keen to encourage me.

“Gus wanted to be an artist when he was little,” she announced to the family.

“I can’t imagine Gus being little,” said Helen.

“I can, he’s got a very boyish face,” said Pippa.

“Who’s Gus?” asked Granny Cee.

“Come on, then, draw something!” Pippa challenged me.

So, with the whole family watching, albeit in a friendly rather than a critical way, I sketched Marmalade, who was asleep in front of the fire.

“But that’s really good!” Lucy exclaimed, when I turned the sketchpad around.

I wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or a little bit offended by her surprise.

I tore the page off and gave it to her.

“I’m going to frame it!”

“Can you draw people?” Pippa asked.

“I’ve never really tried.”

“Try now!” she said. “Go on!”

Keeping the sketchbook almost perpendicular to my thigh to stop anyone seeing my efforts, I did my best to capture Lucy’s face. I noticed that there was a stillness about her expression that didn’t change very much whether she was tired or bored or happy. I’d never seen that before I tried to draw her, but once I had, I could see that in all the photographs on her family’s mantelpiece, Lucy always looked more or less the same. The equivalent photos of me on the mantelpiece at home caught me with all sorts of expressions, from pissed off to totally moronic.

When I allowed the family to look at the drawing, they seemed pleased. I was quite proud of the way I’d caught her aura of contentment.

“It makes you look like one of those dolls that goes to sleep when you tip it back,” said Pippa, peeping over her sister’s shoulder. “Which is actually how you do look, as a matter of fact! Maybe you should have been an artist, Gus!”

“There’s no money in it, though, is there?” I said, with what I thought was the appropriate amount of modesty.

“Even Van Gogh never sold any paintings in his lifetime,” said Lucy.

It was one of two statements that people who knew nothing about art always trotted out. The other was that contemporary art which sold for a lot of money wasn’t really art at all. But I didn’t want to spoil the jollity by getting into a debate about sheep carcasses or unmade beds.

“Sorry about Pip,” said Lucy, as we lay curled around each other in her single bed that night.

“No, I like her. She’s fun.”

I immediately regretted the word when Lucy said, “I should probably be more fun.”

“You’re great fun,” I assured her, hoping she wasn’t going to ask me to put it on a scale of one to ten as she sometimes did with adjectives.

“In a week’s time, it’ll be a year,” said Lucy.

It took me a moment to realize she was talking about us. Did I have to buy a card? Or flowers? Or both?

“Yes,” I said.

“Does it seem longer or shorter to you?”

There was probably a correct answer involved, but I didn’t know which it was. Time was supposed to go quicker when you were having fun, so I thought I should probably say shorter, but I wasn’t completely sure. I’d never thought about it like that.

“It feels like about a year,” I said, uncertainly, feeling fraudulent when she laughed as if I’d been trying to be witty.