Miss You

TWENTY-FOUR Tess

Cherry blossom trees, yellow daffodils, lime-green grass; a paintbox row of houses, blue, pink, aquamarine; pyramids of orange, red and purple fruit. My key in the door, a steep wooden staircase in front of me...

Each morning I woke up with a thump of disappointment; then, getting out of bed, bare wooden boards under my feet, walked to the window, pulled back the blind a fraction and looked out. In the street below, market stallholders were calling to each other as they set up their pitches, poles clanking, a dustbin truck reversing, joggers bouncing past, a well-dressed woman dragging a small, yawning child in a school uniform along the pavement, the sweet waft of croissants filtering up from the cafe next door, all confirming it wasn’t a dream.

I took up running because in London everyone does some kind of exercise, not like at home where you sign up to a Zumba class and start making excuses after a couple of weeks, like it’s raining, or you’re tired, or Homeland is on the telly. In London, you have to have an answer when people ask you how you stay in shape, especially during the Olympics when everyone was pumped up with healthy resolution. Most of our clients went to the gym, but being indoors most of the day, I preferred to exercise outside. It had started off as a walk each morning, but since it took a good fifteen minutes to get to the park, I bought a pair of running shoes and a sports bra, and built up my speed gradually until I could do about six miles in an hour. I’d never run before, but once my legs had got the idea of what was expected of them, it became a bit of an addiction.

People always say that they like New York because it’s exactly how it is in the movies. I love London for the opposite reason. No movie I’ve seen captures London’s variety: the serene elegance of the white stucco buildings; the improbable red-brick Christmas cake of the Royal Albert Hall, golden Albert glinting in the sunshine; horses galloping on Rotten Row; crazy swimmers diving into the Serpentine; and, near Hyde Park Corner, where I turned back for home, gardens with luscious herbaceous borders and pergolas of roses, planted and tended for no other reason than to give people color to look at.

Sometimes I’d find myself listing the flowers, like Hope and I used to do on our walks to school: red-hot poker, lavender, Sweet William, acanthus lily, the names repeating in my head until I reached a rhythm where I’d travel hundreds of yards with no memory of doing so, before returning to the busy immediacy of the Bayswater Road.

I always slowed to a walk at the top of Portobello Road, wondering whether the people who lived in the brightly painted houses woke up each morning with the exhilaration I did, in my flat at the other end of the street.

I say my flat. Really it’s Doll’s. She says it was a business decision, but it was a pretty big coincidence that she decided to open her first London store in the exact place I’d always dreamed of living.

For a while, after Leo, it was like I lost interest in things. I don’t know what I would have done without Doll coming round every week with takeout and a DVD just like she used to.

When she said I should think of my new freedom as an opportunity, I thought she meant university, but since they’d raised the tuition fees, that was never going to happen. The theory was that you earned more as a graduate, so you could pay back your student loan, but graduates were finding it just as difficult to get work as anyone else. And I was disillusioned with professors. I’d hung on Leo’s every word, but I wasn’t sure it’d be worth paying nine thousand pounds a year to listen to him, and that’s before accommodation, bills and food.

“I’m not talking about university,” said Doll. “I’m talking about living in London like we always planned...”

“London’s expensive, Doll. The sort of job I’d be able to get wouldn’t even cover the rent.”

“That’s where I come in.”

“I’m not taking money from you,” I said immediately.

Doll was very generous, but she was over the top. The charm bracelet she bought Hope for her eighteenth was gold and must have cost a fortune, and it went straight into a drawer just like the one we’d bought all those years before on the Ponte Vecchio, never to be looked at again.

“I’m not offering to give you money—I have a business proposition,” Doll said. “I’ve bought this property in West London, a little shop with a flat upstairs. It’s all taking off up there now, what with the euro in crisis and capital flying out of Europe. London’s thought of as a safe haven, and then there’s all the oligarchs. If I don’t get in now, I never will.”

It was amazing how Doll had taught herself about business and economics if you’d seen her grades at school.

“There’s no way, with the baby coming, I’ll be able to oversee things up there as well—”

“I don’t know anything about nails,” I interrupted, because you shouldn’t work for friends, everyone says that, and I wasn’t going to risk losing her as a friend again.

“But you do have transferable skills,” Doll continued, unfazed. “You know about taking on staff, health-and-safety, managing schedules, all that HR stuff. And you’re clever, so it wouldn’t take you more than an afternoon to learn about the ordering and the health regs.”

I opened my mouth to contradict her, then realized she was giving me exactly the sort of pep talk I was always giving middle-aged women who wanted to come back to work after having kids but had lost their confidence and couldn’t believe anyone would want to employ them.

“I need someone I can trust, because there’s a lot riding on this. And I know you won’t fuck up.”

“Just like I haven’t fucked up anything else in my life?” I said despondently.

Now Doll looked impatient. I felt a bit like a candidate on The Apprentice about to get a dressing-down. Maria Newbury didn’t tolerate whining, so if I wanted this opportunity I was going to have to pull myself together and grab it, best friend or not.

“Where is this shop?” I asked.

“So, here’s the thing,” said Doll. “It’s on the Portobello Road.”

I was worried that Doll was overreaching in a recession, but the way she put it was: having your nails done is like buying a caramel latte. When you don’t have a lot of cash to spare, you’ll cut back on spa days and restaurant meals, but you still deserve a little bit of a treat.

Mum used to say that if you do something with a happy heart it will bring you joy. And who wouldn’t be happy stepping out each morning into Portobello Road, popping into a Portuguese cafe for a cappuccino and an almond croissant? Before I became manager of The Dolls House, Portobello, I’d never once painted my nails, let alone had anyone else do it for me. Like the running, it’s surprising how quickly you get addicted. If you’d have told me once that I’d ever express a desire for turquoise toenails to match the color of a new swimsuit, I’d have bet my life against it. Now I saw potential new nail designs everywhere I looked: the pink pompom flowers of a cherry blossom against the azure sky went down well with our Japanese customers; a silver-and-black Art Deco pattern echoed the mirrored interior of the Wolseley, where a lot of our businesswomen clients had breakfast meetings; a single tiny gold-leaf star on midnight blue was very popular at Christmas. Ours was the first nail parlor to reproduce the London 2012 logo, until we received a warning about copyright infringement.

It was me who noticed that the only other shops that seemed to be thriving in the midst of austerity were tattoo parlors. I’d never dare to have a tattoo myself and thought there must be others like me, so I managed to source some beautiful temporary tattoos made of organic vegetable dyes, which looked cool, didn’t hurt and stayed on your skin for a few showers if you didn’t go at them too vigorously with a loofah. Doll was delighted that I was “adding value” to the business.

I joined a writing class at the City Lit. Not fiction. I’d had enough of fiction with Leo. This was called Life Writing, and it attracted a flotsam and jetsam of oddballs, like me, who’d come to a watershed in their lives.

Sarah had been married to a very rich guy who traded her in for a younger model, literally, because she had been a model too, and she was still thin and walked with her legs crossing over each step, but anxiety had etched itself in lines on her once-smooth face.

Lorcan was a motorbike courier who was trying to reconstruct his memory after suffering severe head injuries in a near-fatal road accident. We were very different people, but we got comfortable quite quickly because of trusting each other with a lot of personal information.

And then an Australian set designer called Gayle turned up. When she read out a funny piece about her fascination with her ex-lover’s growth of designer stubble, I knew we’d be friends. She’d had a six-year affair with her former boss in Melbourne. Apparently he’d suffered from “existential despair” just like Leo. “Mid-life crisis,” Gayle called it.

She and I often went for a drink or a movie together after class, and on Sundays in the summer, queued for the Proms or the free gigs in Hyde Park. It was nice having a female friend my own age to do things with. Being a teaching assistant and at Waitrose, I’d always ended up with middle-aged female friends, apart from Doll, and Doll had never done culture.

“Your creativity’s finally been unleashed,” said Shaun when he and Kev came over for a holiday.

They stayed at a boutique hotel in Fitzrovia and I met up with them most evenings, feeling quite sophisticated because I now knew which restaurants were in vogue and which were the must-see plays. We did the touristy things too, like tea at Fortnum Mason, and cocktails in the American Bar at the Savoy, even though the prices were ridiculous if you allowed yourself to think about how many mojitos you could get from a bottle of Havana Club, a bag of limes and a packet of fresh mint from Waitrose.

“How are you?” Shaun asked the day we spent alone together, when Kev went down to visit Dad and Hope.

We were at the David Hockney exhibition in the Royal Academy. I loved that exhibition so much I went back five times. Most of the paintings were of trees, and even though I’ve seen trees all my life, those paintings changed the way I look at them. Some of Hockney’s colors are so bright they seem almost crude and artificial, but when you really look at new leaves with spring sunshine on them, or red twigs in a winter hedgerow, you see they are that vivid. For me, that exhibition literally made the world more colorful.

We were in a room with giant canvases showing the same thicket in the four different seasons.

“I’m happy,” I told him. “And I’ve decided that I’m going to have the surgery. There’s a process you have to go through, with counseling to see if you’re ready psychologically, then consultations with the surgeon, so it may take a year or more...”

Shaun nodded. I couldn’t tell if he thought it was a good idea or not.

“Even when you get a date, it’s not fixed because they’ll postpone you if someone needs it more urgently,” I continued. “But I am on the pathway now and I’m feeling very positive about it.”

We moved on into a room full of paintings of white hawthorn blossom.

“Before, it always felt like I would be giving up on life if I had everything removed, but now it feels as if I’m embracing life.” I paused. “And you won’t believe this, but I’ve decided to get reconstruction too. At first I thought, that’s just not me, but then I thought, why not? They offer it free. It’s not like silicone implants because they take tissue from your thighs or tummy so that it ages with you...”

“Doesn’t look like there’s much to take,” Shaun said, looking at my newly toned legs.

I managed a grin. “I’ve always wanted smaller breasts.”

Shaun smiled at me. He did approve, I thought. And actually, it didn’t matter whether he did or he didn’t, because I knew it was right for me.

We went for a walk in Green Park afterwards. Sunshine was filtering through the big shady trees, making random dots of bright white light on the tarmac that danced as the branches swayed in the breeze.

“Seems like you’re in a good place,” Shaun said.

“Being in a good place” was one of those phrases that Doll used a lot too.

Yes, I always felt like saying. I’m in London!

“And is there a new man in your life?” Shaun asked.

“No,” I said.

Everyone else seemed to know how to have a relationship—Doll, Dad, even Hope, for God’s sake!—but I didn’t.

Gayle was a serial Internet dater. She was signed up with Match.com and eHarmony and all the rest of them, and she was always telling me I should give it a go, but, to be honest, the string of funny stories she told about her encounters put me off. Sometimes I even suspected she was going on the dates simply to write about them.

One evening, when we were sitting with a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc waiting to watch L’Elisir d’Amore relayed live to the piazza outside the Opera House in Covent Garden, she got me to ask her questions to practice for a speed-dating event. I asked her some of the interview questions we used in HR, like, “How would your friends describe you in three words?” and, “If you were a vegetable, what would you be?”

“An onion?” said Gayle.

“Why?”

“Because it’s got lots of layers...”

“But the smell lasts all day on your hands and it makes you cry,” I pointed out.

“OK. I’ll say a tomato.”

“Technically, that’s a fruit.”

“You’d be hopeless at speed dating,” said Gayle.

“I know,” I said.

“How do you envisage meeting someone?” Gayle asked.

“I think it’ll have to be more spontaneous,” I replied.

What put me off about all the new ways was that it was like you were sitting with a sign over your head saying, “I want a boyfriend.” I had the standard Richard Curtis–movie type of fantasy, where a stranger would bump into me, spilling my latte, and we’d look into each other’s eyes and know.

“So, there’s this new app you should try, called Tinder,” said Gayle. “It shows you photos of people in the area who are also using it. So, if you like the look of someone, you just swipe yes, and if they swipe back, it’s a match and you can message each other. It’s a bit like when you catch someone’s eye on the Tube, you know? But you’re doing something about it.”

She got out her iPhone and demonstrated. There were seven men in the vicinity using the app. Were some of them in this crowd? I wondered. Or even inside the Opera House? It was kind of spooky. Gayle swiped yes to two of them. One was a match. What U doing? he messaged. Watching the opera, she tapped. He didn’t reply.

“Saves a lot of time,” said Gayle.

“Have you actually met anyone?” I asked.

“Three guys. Two losers. The third, a pistol between the sheets. You should try it.”

“You had sex with a stranger?” I asked, in what Doll always called my “nun’s voice,” just as the crowd fell silent for the beginning of the overture.

“What’s to lose?” Doll asked when we met for our twice-monthly business meeting.

“My dignity?” I said.

“No big deal, then.”

We both sprayed crumbs across the table laughing.

We usually had our lunch in the Michelin-starred restaurant down the road, but sometimes Doll brought Elsie, my goddaughter, along with her, so we were eating baguettes in my flat while Elsie cooked a wooden lunch with the toy kitchen I’d bought for when she visited.

“Come on,” said Doll. “Let’s sign you up before you change your mind.”

I was slightly alarmed by her vicarious enthusiasm for the project, remembering how much she’d nagged me to get engaged to Dave, when subconsciously she was the one who’d wanted to.

We got as far as selecting a photo from my Facebook page when Doll suddenly called a halt.

“No,” she said. “Nobody’s going to swipe that.”

“Thanks.”

“Only because you take a rotten photo,” she said. “If you’re trying to look sexy, you look fed up; when the camera catches you unawares, you can look a bit mad, which isn’t you in real life, promise. What we need is a professional head shot. It’ll be tax-deductible for publicity purposes.”

So I spent an afternoon in a photographer’s studio with a hair and make-up artist and came out with a series of sultry photos that looked nothing like me at all. Which was actually a good thing, I thought, because if nobody swiped me, I wouldn’t take it personally.

Gayle bought me a packet of condoms, because the one thing you couldn’t do was have unprotected sex with a stranger, and a cucumber from the vegetable stall in case I needed to practice rolling it on.

“Bloody hell!” I said, when I saw the size of it.

“If you were a vegetable...” Her eyes twinkled. “What was Leo like, then?”

“More of a dill pickle,” I said wickedly, thinking how he’d hate me saying that.

However much you tell yourself that it’s just a bit of a laugh and you’re not going to worry one way or another, unreciprocated swiping isn’t a good feeling. I only persevered because Gayle and Doll kept texting me for updates.

On Sunday morning, sitting behind my Observer in the cafe next door, I jumped as my phone vibrated a match. Carl. He and I shared Lorcan as a Facebook friend, which was a tiny bit reassuring.

Thomas Hardy or David Nicholls?he messaged, which I thought was clever because one wrote Tess of the d’Urbervilles and the other wrote One Day, which has a quote from Tess at the front.

Both, I messaged back.

Coffee?

Drinking one right now.

Where?

Carl was there in less than the ten minutes he said it would take him, so I didn’t have the chance to change my mind. He was reasonably tall, with broad shoulders, floppy blond hair, and about twenty-one. There was a really horrible moment when he looked around the cafe, his eyes travelling straight past me, but then he smiled, eyebrows raised, and I smiled back.

“Tess?”

I wasn’t sure whether to get up, or stay sitting or air-kiss or what, so I just said, “Have a seat,” as if he’d come for a job interview.

He was wearing jeans and a grey T-shirt that was quite clingy so you could see the contours of his chest and he carried around him the warm, slightly animal smell of a man who’d just woken up. I imagined him sprawled across a big double bed, phone on the pillow, opening a bleary eye to look at my photo and failing to register I was at least ten years older than him.

“Can I get you something?” I asked.

“I could murder a bacon sandwich,” he said.

I got myself another latte and a little custard tart.

He told me he was a student doing a degree in English literature and Icelandic because his mother was from Iceland. For some reason, I told him that I had studied English literature too, and we talked about books we had read recently, and when he asked me what I did, I said I was a writer.

“Wow!” he said, staring at my mouth.

“What?” I asked.

“You’ve got a flake of pastry... no, other side.”

The conversation seemed to have come to a natural close. Perhaps he didn’t believe I was a writer, or perhaps because he was so young and beautiful, writing was the last thing on his mind.

“So, what shall we do now?” he asked, holding my eyes with his.

“We could go for a walk?” I suggested. “It’s a lovely day. But I’ll need to get different shoes.” I was wearing flip-flops. “My flat’s next door.”

“Right,” he said, standing up with me.

I didn’t mean that. I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted. What if he was a strangler? But now it would sound rude to say, “No, you just sit here and wait.” And he’d probably be gone when I got back.

“I didn’t actually mean, you know...,” I stammered.

He smiled slowly. “But is it such a terrible idea?”

Ten years younger, but far more grown up than me.

This was new territory. Casual sex with a toyboy I would never see again. He might be a murderer, but the truth was probably more that he’d woken up with a hard-on.

“OK then,” I said.

My flat is really one large room with the kitchen units and table at one end and a double bed in the front bit near the sash windows looking over the street. I immediately went to the sink and filled the kettle, but when I swung around and said, “Coffee?” he’d already taken off his T-shirt. His torso was like a sculpture.

“Do you wax?” I asked him out of professional curiosity.

“I don’t need to,” he said.

So young he hadn’t even grown body hair.

“I don’t do this sort of thing,” I said. “So I’ve really no idea what the procedure is.”

He laughed gently.

“Just relax,” he said, walking towards me, taking the kettle from my hands and putting it down on the table.

I raised my arms obligingly as he lifted the loose silk shirt I was wearing over my head, removed my bra and cupped my breasts as if he was weighing them, then kissed each one. He unbuttoned my jeans. I stepped out of them. Taking my hand, he pulled me to the bed, lay down next to me, his fingers finding places no other man had found. I began to lose myself to tingles of pleasure so unexpected I started laughing.

“What?” He drew back.

“No, don’t stop, it’s lovely!”

“Do you want me to wear a condom?”

“Of course,” I said.

Carl took the condom from me and carefully rolled it on—which was a relief because, even after practicing on the cucumber, I still didn’t feel very confident—then he gave me another slow smile.

There was something a little odd about taking instructions from a stranger, but I found it empowering looking down at his beautiful face, relaxing as I got it right.

“That’s good. Now do this... yes... like that... oh, yes!”

I’d been in love with Leo, but we’d never talked during sex. I didn’t even know this guy and yet he felt about a hundred times more involved.

Afterwards, I lay on his chest, his sculpted pecs against my breasts, our bodies breathing in sync. Then he withdrew carefully, and wrapped the condom in a tissue.

“A lot of women your age want a baby,” he said.

After what we’d just done, I felt it was slightly ungallant of him to refer to my age.

“And you do that?” I asked, primly. “Aren’t you afraid you might have kids all over the place?”

“Is that such a terrible idea?”

Jesus!

He started getting dressed. I remained in bed, under the duvet, oddly embarrassed now to be naked in front of him.

Carl.

For some reason, that ad that used to be everywhere flashed across my mind. I began to laugh again. He looked at me, perplexed.

“Carling refreshes the places other beers cannot reach!”

(“Can you believe he was too young to know that ad?” I asked Doll, when I called her straight after he’d gone.

“Wasn’t it Heineken?” she said.)

“So, what are you supposed to say after one of these encounters?” I asked him as he tied his laces.

“I had a good time,” he said, leaning over the bed to give me a final kiss.

“Me too,” I squeaked, pulling the duvet right up to my chin.

He opened the door and looked at me. I waved my fingers over the top of the duvet and then the door closed, he was gone, and the flat felt very silent. I thought for a moment that I might cry, but my mind was perfectly clear and happy; my body tingled all over as if it had been reawakened. The pleasures of the flesh, I thought giddily, touching myself again down there where it still felt warm and fluttery with one hand, running the other ever so lightly over my breasts, feeling my nipples pucker up beneath the tips of my fingers. I stopped, lifted my hand away, then touched again, pushing a little harder.

The lump was right behind the nipple, not around the edges of the breast, where I’d always imagined finding it.

(“Oh shit,” said Doll.)

The trouble with embracing life is you forget to fear the worst. It had only been six months since my annual MRI scan and a doctor had examined me in preparation for surgery since then, and I’d checked myself, but clearly not as rigorously as I should have because the lump was already the size of a hazelnut.

If you were a nut, what would you be?

The locum GP said it was probably a cyst, because it was incredibly rare for someone of my age to get breast cancer.

“Look at my notes,” I said.

His face changed. And I knew then, for sure.

People talk about waiting lists at hospitals, but when it’s cancer, everything moves very fast. You’re going along with your life, having casual sex with a Nordic student, then two weeks later, you’re lying in one of those hospital gowns waiting to go down to the operating theatre, and you’re thinking, What if I hadn’t met Carl? Would I now be running around Hyde Park as normal? How big would the lump have had to get? How long would I have gone on feeling fine?

My dad and Anne came to see me with Hope.

“First my wife, now my daughter!” Dad started, before Anne ordered him to go outside and get some air.

“You’re strong, Tess,” she said, gripping my hand, big gold rings digging into the undersides of my fingers. “You’ve got what it takes to fight this thing off.”

But I knew it didn’t work like that. My mother was a strong woman. Quiet, but strong. Nobody just surrenders, do they?

“Do you have a pink diamond?” Hope asked.

“Pink diamond?” I echoed.

“Doll got a pink diamond against breast cancer,” said Hope.

The nurse asked me if I was ready for my anesthetic.

Anne gave me a kiss, then left me with Hope. I thought for a moment that my sister was going to follow suit and kiss me too, but she didn’t. She just stood there. Suddenly, I really needed to feel Hope’s awkward, ungiving weight against my chest and smell the familiar scent of L’Oréal Kids strawberry shampoo I’d washed her hair in so many times and which she still used because it wouldn’t occur to her to try anything else.

I’d always loved Hope unconditionally, but just this once I so wanted to be loved back.

Feeling myself drifting, I stretched my hand towards her, but still she stood just out of reach.

“You’re not going to die, Tree,” she suddenly announced.

In my woozy state, I could picture the conversation that had gone on, when Hope, hearing the word “cancer,” would have asked, “Is Tree going to die?”

And Anne and my father would have looked at each other awkwardly, not knowing quite how to respond, and, just before the silence got too long, one of them, probably Anne, would have said, “No. She’s not going to die.”

Because we’d all learned over the years that Hope didn’t do “probably” or “yet.” What she needed was an answer to her question.

Just like the rest of us, really.

A wave of blissful relief, knowing that I meant something to her, washed through my body. Maybe it was just the drugs.

“Are you asleep?” Hope asked.

“Almost,” I whispered.

“Shall I sing you?”

“Yes, please.”

So I was lulled into anesthesia by her pitch-perfect cover of ABBA’s “I Have a Dream.”