Four months before Catherine
I am meeting Liv at the Serpentine Café in Hyde Park, always one of our favourite places back in the day.
We would meet here on a Sunday morning, recounting tales of the night before over weak cappuccinos, while the health nuts ran by in their neon Lycra.
Now she’s the girl in Lycra, insisting on a trip to the gym before she meets me.
She exercises in a kind of religious fervour these days, half-marathons at the weekend, 6 a.m. trips to the swimming pool.
This has always been my favourite park.
I love it for the green-and-white-striped deckchairs, for the blow-dried Kensington mummies buttoning up their toddlers and the roller-bladers who whizz around the lake, insolently weaving in and out of walkers, too confident and too fast to care about rebuttal.
I love it for the trees – oaks, chestnuts and planes, sycamores and limes, a whole colour chart of greens and yellow, with sudden bursts of cherry and crab-apple pink in springtime.
When I was young, my parents used to bring me here, in my own buttoned-up navy-blue coat.
We’d walk hand in hand, the three of us, to the lake, where we’d feed the ducks with crusts of bread my father had saved up during the week.
Our children loved it here too, shifting between the paddling pool and sandpit at the top of the Lido to the little playground by the barracks.
Standing against the wire netting, transfixed, as a troop of guardsmen galloped by on their way to Buckingham Palace, an everyday occurrence if you timed it right.
Joe and Daisy are everywhere as I cross the park today and I long to talk to them, but they are in Cornwall now, surfing or crabbing or mackerel fishing or perhaps parked up in a sand dune with one of their grandmother’s mammoth picnics.
‘Call the kids whenever you want,’ Sam told me last night, as though all of a sudden I was the one in the wrong.
‘But you are right, we need space to think. Let’s not talk for a bit.
’
When I think of the alternative – Sam holed up in some shitty two-bedroom flat in Frome, the kids going off to stay with him every other weekend – all I want is to run back to him and lock the doors behind us.
I chose Sam – or rather, I chose to go back to Sam, after you – and I taught myself to love him with an intensity that could not be challenged.
I’ve hidden within our marriage for thirteen years.
And though I continue to look for you online and in the papers (as bad as Julia, in my own way, with my closet stalking), I do it to reassure myself that you are happy, or perhaps some less trite approximation of that word, and that I did the right thing in leaving you and not forcing you to choose between me and your oldest friend.
The choice I made was stark and uncompromising, just like the two worlds that you and Sam inhabit: one veined with danger, it seems to me, the other as white and blameless as a glass of milk.
As I approach the café, I see no sign of Liv.
There’s a couple with a baby in a high chair, the mother holding out torn bits of croissant, which the baby grabs and drops to the floor.
Two girls are talking intensely while their coffees cool, untouched, in front of them, and right by the entrance three cyclists swig from bottles of Evian.
I am about to sit down at a table when I notice, on the perimeter of my vision, a tall man leaning up against the wooden fence that circuits the lake.
My whole body lurches with the instant, feverish blood rush of recognition.
My instinct is to run, but it is too late, too late.
You turn, see me and wave, a casual, non-committal wave that reminds me of our beginning.
I am frozen here looking at you, the real you, not just the two-dimensional photographs that have become your replacement over the years.
The shock must be written on my face, because as soon as you are close enough, you say, ‘Liv didn’t tell you, did she?
’
‘She knows I wouldn’t have come.
’
And those are my first words to you in fifteen years.
I watch you incline your head.
A look of resignation flits across your face.
‘I didn’t mean that as it sounds.
’
‘Is it really so bad seeing me again?’
‘The opposite of bad.’
You smile then, the same trademark smirk, corners down.
‘What about a coffee, at least?’
I want to, oh I want to, but I am so afraid of the questions you might ask.
I hold out both of my hands and we inspect them shaking.
‘Not sure I can hold a cup.’
‘Come on, I’ll carry it for you.
’
I follow you into the café, where we queue side by side for our coffees.
You are wearing a denim shirt, black jeans and a pair of once-white Converse.
With your back to me, I can look at your hands, long, slim, tanned fingers, nails cut short.
And your hair, which still curls over the collar of your shirt.
How long have we got?
I want to look at you properly, to examine your face for any change: day-old stubble almost as thick as a beard, new lines around your eyes.
Our thoughts must be running in parallel, for you turn to me and say, ‘You look exactly the same.’
‘I don’t feel the same, that’s for sure.
’
‘Two kids,’ you say, missing the point.
‘So grown up.’
‘Did Liv tell you what’s happened?
’
‘She did. I’m sorry.
’
You have balanced our coffees on a black plastic tray and you carry them outside to the table nearest the lake.
There’s a moment of silence, both of us searching for the right thing to say.
I watch you pick up your cup and put it down again without taking a sip.
‘You’re in pieces, aren’t you?
I’m sorry, perhaps this was the wrong thing to do.
’
‘I’m not sure I am.
In pieces, I mean. I think, underneath it all, there’s a feeling of relief that at least we’ve started talking.
’
I think but do not say that things were never quite right between us.
How could they have been?
How could anyone have been right after you?
You lean a little closer towards me, only an inch or so, but enough to send shock waves through me.
Your face, a little older it’s true, is still stupidly handsome, though it was never about that for me.
Unthinkably, I want to reach out and touch your hand.
‘I can’t quite believe it’s you,’ you say, like you’re reading my mind.
‘I’d given up hope of ever seeing you again.
’
My heart is beating wildly.
It’s hard to breathe.
‘Me too.’
I think how much easier it has been for me to keep tabs on you, checking the papers or surfing the net for new photographs and almost always finding them.
With me there’s no Facebook, no Twitter, no Instagram.
I wanted to disappear and that’s what I did.
You push your cup to one side as if you mean business, and now I’m coiled inside, sensing the question, counting the seconds until you ask it.
I know it’s coming. I see it.
I see it.
‘I’ve been trying so hard not to ask you this, but it’s no good.
I have to know. Will you tell me what happened?
Why you ran away?’
The wash of coldness is instant, the feeling that there’s nowhere to run.
Memories I don’t want crowding my brain.
I stand up abruptly and my chair tips over, rattling to the ground.
‘Catherine?’
You stand up too.
‘I can’t do this.’
You reach out to take my hand and we stand there on either side of the table, connected by this strange, extended handshake.
‘Why not?’ you say, tightening your grip.
‘How can it matter after all this time? I know something must have happened. Something I don’t understand.
’
‘I can’t talk about it.
’
You let go of my hand and it feels cold and lifeless without yours.
‘Do you want me to go?’ you ask.
I feel the grip of panic, a tightening in my chest.
You leaving now, after all this time apart, is the last thing I can bear.
‘Could we just walk for a while?’
We leave our coffees and begin to walk slowly, in silence, around the lake.
The things I want are impossible.
I’d like to find a tree and lean against it and press myself into your arms, not to kiss, just to feel you against me, the warmth of your skin, your stubble on my face, your breath against my cheeks, and then I’d like to freeze the moment for an eternity.
Impossible not to remember the first time we kissed, in your student bedroom so many years ago.
We’d toppled onto your bed and you kissed every bit of my face: eyes, nose, throat, finally my mouth.
‘I’ve wanted to do that for days,’ you said.
‘Have you? But why?’
‘Why do you think? Because you’re beautiful and I haven’t been able to get you out of my mind.
’
‘I’m not beautiful,’ I said, and I remember how you laughed.
When I looked in the mirror I always noticed the pallor of my skin against the darkness of my hair.
I thought I looked washed out, insipid, ghostly.
You led me over to the full-length mirror in the corner of the room.
‘Can’t you see how lovely you are?
’
You stood behind me, lifted up my hair and kissed the back of my neck, and the sensation of your mouth on my skin was almost more than I could bear.
You drew your fingers slowly across the features of my face, the length of my nose, the breadth of my lips.
We locked eyes in the mirror as you unbuttoned the top button of my shirt, then another and another, until it swung open and I was standing there in my pale blue bra.
We didn’t speak, not one word, just the blood rushing in my ears as you removed every piece of my clothing, barely even touching me, until I stood there entirely naked.
I can recall exactly the sharp shock of eroticism, pressing my bare flesh against fully clothed you, your hands reaching up to touch my breasts, your mouth warm against my neck.
My first taste of sexual adventure and I was hooked.
I am blinded by longing, breathless with it.
Sam flashes into my mind, Sam and then Julia, and I know this will be my excuse.
We are halfway around the lake now on the opposite side to the café, and as we approach it, an old man stands up and vacates his bench.
I take your hand and pull you towards it, and just that brief touch of flesh on flesh is a current running through my bones.
We sit down and look at each other.
This is it. My chance to overturn fifteen years of regret.
‘I’ve thought of you every single day since I left,’ I say.