Beth
Beth
A few seconds earlier, she emerged from the shiny stainless-steel escalator onto a grand plaza, and it was like entering a completely different world.
The sky above is dark but lights twinkle at her from all directions, and there are people everywhere.
She’s never been to Canary Wharf before. It doesn’t feel real, somehow. It’s like a grown-up’s Disneyland.
She stands, self-consciously, for a few minutes, keeping her head low. She has a sudden fear that she might vomit. But then she hears someone calling her name. At the sound of his voice, tears threaten to fall and she fights them back with everything she has.
‘Beth!’
She looks up and sees him, intrigued by how his gait can still feel so familiar after all this time, as he half walks, half runs towards her. He’s wearing a mackintosh that flaps behind him.
His hair has been cut, a sensible short back and sides. Shorter than she’s ever seen it. She frowns. She liked its floppy scruffiness.
But of course, he’s not the Nick she fell in love with at university. The Nick who abandoned her after the fire. They are both changed; so much so that they are almost different people entirely.
But as he reaches her, she’s overcome by a pain in her chest. Unexpected but visceral. Undeniable.
God, how can it be that she still loves him? She loves him so much. Why did she let him go?
She didn’t have a choice.
‘Hi,’ she says, as he kisses her on each cheek. It’s perfunctory, awkward. ‘Where are your glasses?’
‘Got my eyes lasered last year. Best thing I ever did.’
She smiles. He looks slim. His cheeks are red, his eyes shining. Has he been drinking, or has he taken something?
She stares at him.
‘You look so different.’
‘Well, I guess it’s been a long time since we actually saw each other,’ he says. But then he frowns. ‘Oh, Beth. Have you been crying?’
She raises a hand to her eyes.
The tendon in his jaw pulses. ‘What happened? Are you OK?’
Are you OK?
The honest answer flashes through her mind, catching her unawares: Not without you.
‘It’s a long story. Can we just go back to yours?’
His eyes are watery in the streetlight. He puts an arm around her shoulder.
‘Of course,’ he says, softly, and for the first time in hours, she feels herself relax.
*
Nick lives on the twentieth floor of a brand-new skyscraper in Canary Wharf, overlooking the whole of Docklands.
He has a one-bedroom flat, and as they go inside, there’s a musty smell in the air that tells her it’s been a while since he opened a window.
The flat is more like a very large hotel room than someone’s home. On the way up Nick explained that the tower block has a receptionist – although he called the bored-looking chap sitting at the desk in the lobby ‘the concierge’ – a gym and a cinema in the basement. There’s even a library. Which Beth finds amusing, because she can’t really imagine any of the occupants of this building sitting down at any point with a good book. But perhaps she’s being unfair.
‘Sorry about the mess,’ Nick says as he flicks on lights.
The kitchen area, a corner of the main living space, is a little cluttered with empty cups and takeaway boxes, but it’s certainly no messier than Beth’s own flat. Then again, this is Nick. He was always curiously tidy.
She can’t see a single plant, which surprises her. He had so many lined up on the windowsill in his tiny room at university.
‘What’s out there?’ she says, pointing to a glass sliding door.
‘It’s the winter garden,’ he says. ‘Otherwise known as a balcony. Except the whole thing is enclosed in glass, so that no one can throw themselves off, no matter how miserable their life gets. I mostly use it to dry my laundry.’
‘Sensible,’ she says. ‘I hope your life isn’t… I hope you’ve never thought of doing that?’
It would be understandable, she knows. It would be entirely understandable for either – or both – of them to have felt that way at some point.
He ignores her question.
‘Wine?’ he says, as she takes her coat off and hangs it over one of the dining chairs.
‘Oh, could I just have some water?’
He looks tired, dark circles under his eyes, but she’s jealous of his life, of how grown-up and together he seems, when she’s made a total mess of everything.
‘You can.’ He hands her a tall tumbler. ‘Now, are you going to tell me? What happened? I have to say when you called this… This isn’t what I was expecting.’
They sit together on his L-shaped sofa.
‘I’ve left Paulo. I can’t stay with him any longer. All we do is fight. I thought it was the drink… but I don’t know. He says he’s passionate, that it’s his Italian blood, but then I found out his parents are from Milton Keynes. I think his paternal grandmother was Italian but really. The link is tenuous.’
He smiles. She knows that he would laugh at her joke, but how could he laugh at her when she’s so upset? There isn’t anything funny about it.
‘I’ve been an idiot. He was very charming when we first met and I fell for it. I don’t know. It’s been so hard, you know. To find work. To make a life in London. So much harder than I expected.’
‘You’re not an idiot, Beth,’ Nick says, taking a sip of red wine from an enormous glass. The stem of it is so thin it looks as though it would shatter if he squeezed it too hard.
‘I am,’ she says. ‘Because now what? I’ve got nowhere to live.’
His eyebrows rise.
‘Did he hurt you?’ he says, eventually. His eyebrows knit together.
She swallows.
‘No,’ she says, eventually. ‘He took out his anger on the remote control. But things have been terrible between us for ages now. I don’t really know why we ever got together, to be honest.’
That’s not entirely true. She does know: it was because she wanted some security, someone to share her life with, and Paulo offered to be that person.
‘Tonight… I was goading him,’ she continues. ‘He thought he was going to get this part – he was so cocky about it – and he found out today it had gone to someone else… and I was just so frustrated with him, because he always does this, you know? He thinks something will come along and everything will just work out. Like magic. All our problems will disappear with a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. He doesn’t seem to understand that we’re late on the electricity bill… that life costs money, that I’m working as hard as I can but that I can’t earn enough for us both.’
Nick shakes his head from side to side.
‘He sounds like a wanker…’
‘Oh, please. Please don’t do that Alpha Male thing. I want the opposite of that. And that’s exactly why I rang you.’
He smiles, sets his wine glass down on the coffee table.
‘If it’s money… you know…’
She looks down at her lap.
‘No,’ she says, firmly. ‘Thank you, I’ll be alright. I just need… some time to sort myself out.’
‘You can stay here. You will stay here. As long as you like. I’m basically never here anyway. It’s a waste, me paying rent on this place given the number of hours I’m actually here.’
She looks around.
‘Oh, but…’
He waves a hand in front of her.
‘It’s nothing. If I’m not at the office then I’m at Celine’s…’
She swallows.
Of course. Of course he would be seeing someone. Look at him. He’s a success. He has a first-class degree in Economics. He has a Burberry mackintosh. And a proper job. A real job, with a reliable income and a pension and a yearly bonus. He’s had his eyes lasered. He’s a catch.
She knew all this, on one level, but seeing him here, looking so together , makes something uncomfortable rise within her: envy.
Or is it anger? How come he got to come out of it all unscathed, successful, when he was the one who left?
‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Celine.’
He shrugs, won’t meet her eye.
‘It’s still early days. She’s cool.’
‘It’d be nice to meet her one day.’
No it wouldn’t. It would be horrible and awful.
He wrinkles his nose.
He doesn’t want to talk about Celine, and neither does she.