February #3
Noah had worked in the same university department for the entire time I’d known him.
He spent his days researching and writing about diplomacy, nationalism, and conflict past and present, as well as teaching.
He cared as much about his students and their futures as he did his own work, encouraging them to apply for internships and then jobs, joining them on marches.
His ability to sit and immerse himself in a text, no matter what was going on around him, was one of my favourite things about him.
He would probably have said the same about me and paintings.
‘Well, I would promote you,’ I said, hooking an ankle around his.
‘That’s good enough for me.’
Our mains arrived, followed by a double portion of tiramisu adorned with a single candle.
Noah sang to me, quietly to begin with, then loud enough for the tables on either side of us to hear.
My cheeks were burning, but that didn’t deter him – we both knew that I secretly loved being serenaded on my birthday.
When he was done, I blew him a kiss, and the waiter brought us complimentary shots of limoncello.
On the Tube home, he told me there was a birthday present waiting for me in the bedroom.
I gave him a look, and he laughed.
It turned out there was a parcel tucked away in his bedside table. I asked if I could wait and open it the following morning and have my other gift first.
‘Your other gift?’ he asked, pulling me towards him hungrily.
His lips tasted of lemon sherbet.
After, I went to the loo, and there it was – as they say, better late than never.
I stared at the swatch of red until my vision blurred, then I shook my head and looked away.
When I stood up and went to wash my hands, I realised I was trembling.
I gripped the edge of the sink to try to steady myself, but the tremors started up again as soon as I loosened my hold.
I gazed at my reflection in the mirror and tried to work out whether I’d had too much wine, or whether it was something else.
Again, I willed my gut feeling into action. Again, it played dead.
Had you ever imagined the two of us together, Noah asked me, lying in bed the morning after the first time we’d slept together, our limbs entwined beneath the duvet.
My head was resting on his steadily rising and falling chest, and his index finger was drawing faint circles around my hip.
In truth, I hadn’t – I’d always thought of him as Anna’s – but I didn’t want him to interpret my loyalty as indifference, so I lied and told him I had.
And you? He told me he had, too. For a while it made me wonder if he still pictured himself with other women.
That was how we met – he and Anna had been dating.
It would have been a dodgy move on my part if she hadn’t been the one to suggest that he and I get together.
By this point, she’d been introduced to her now-husband, though she maintains there was no overlap and that Caleb had nothing to do with her dumping Noah.
Still, she traded in a brilliant if slightly scruffy lecturer in international relations for a hot young music producer with his own record label.
It was Anna who’d pursued Noah in the first place.
They’d met through a mutual friend who also worked in the war studies department.
Back then, when we were in our early twenties, she’d been charmed by him being a decade older and having more than one book to his credit.
He was as kind and supportive then as he is now, two qualities she’d long been craving – she would laugh when asked about it, make some joke about Freud and her ‘daddy issues’.
Maybe I was craving those qualities too.
Though I loved my father dearly – he was the only man I’d ever loved before Noah – it was my mother I missed if we ever went more than a week without speaking.
I followed up with Anna a couple of days after my birthday.
Caleb was away that weekend, so she suggested we spend the Sunday together.
After my morning run, I caught the overground from Hackney Central to Kentish Town, where they’d lived for roughly the same amount of time that Noah and I had been in London Fields.
We got lucky, Anna would tell friends, when they commented on the size of the house, and the garden, and the shed that Caleb had converted into a home studio.
She’d stretch her lips into an apology as she added, It seems our house price has been the one good thing to come out of us leaving the EU!
In fact, they’d paid just under the asking price, and the seesaw of Brexit negotiations had only just begun.
I arrived at the recently brightened brick facade and climbed the steep stone steps to the front door, the letterbox of which was stuffed with weekend papers. The bell emitted a two-pitched ‘ding-dong’. A moment later, the click of a lock and the glossy black door swung open.
‘Cathy, hello!’ Anna had Theo on her hip. My unofficial godson.
She ushered me into their honey-coloured hallway, and I took off my coat and hung it on the rack while she closed the door behind me and freed the papers from the letterbox’s grip.
I considered kicking off my shoes, wary of the leafy mulch that had gathered on the pavements after a night of heavy rain, but decided instead to give them a quick wipe on the doormat.
Anna didn’t care about that kind of thing.
After she’d lowered a babbling Theo to the floor, paved with reclaimed tiles, we hugged, and I breathed in the sweet scent of her woody perfume muddled with baby skin, soft and clean.
‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said, clinging on tight like we were floating in the middle of the ocean and I was her rubber ring. ‘And not just because I haven’t spoken to anyone above the age of two since Caleb left on Friday morning.’
‘It’s good to see you, too,’ I said, laughing. ‘Both of you. In fact, I might have something in here for a certain small friend of mine.’
Theo’s coffee-coloured eyes ballooned as I knelt beside him and began to rootle around in my bag. He’d inherited them from Caleb, together with his thick black hair ; even with a buzz cut, Caleb’s was glossy and dark. Theo’s skin, a warm brown, was a blend of his mum and dad’s.
‘Um, you’re the one who’s supposed to be receiving gifts today,’ said Anna, tapping me with her toes.
I reminded her that I got a good discount in the museum shop and handed him a colouring book of paintings by famous artists. He opened it onto a pot of sunflowers.
‘Oh Theo, isn’t that kind of your fairy godmother? Are you going to give her a big kiss to say thank you?’
Still holding onto his book, he reached out his pudgy arms.
Anna and Caleb had a cleaner who came every Monday, and yet, whenever I visited at the weekend, their beautiful home looked like it had been burgled.
The blue table in the hall became a landing station for bags, post, keys.
Pairs of shoes lined the hall, and that day a small, foldable umbrella that had been left to dry half-closed resembled a crouching spider.
As I made my way to the kitchen at the back of the house, overlooking the garden, I glanced into the living room and could barely make out the sofa beneath the soft toys and magazines.
It would have driven me mad, and Noah madder, but they weren’t fazed by it.
I suppose they knew that, in a couple of days, order would be restored.
While Anna put Theo down for a nap, and I waited for the kettle to boil, I returned various bits and pieces to the kitchen cupboards, painted a soothing sage green, and wiped the counter clean, scrubbing extra hard at a sticky patch by the sink.
When the whistle sounded, I made two mugs of milky tea, Anna’s sweetened with sugar.
I brought them over to the table, pollinated with crumbs, and smiled as I noticed a bunch of irises wrapped in brown paper and an envelope with my name on it.
I was loading the dishwasher when Anna wafted in and plonked herself down in the chair closest to the window.
She was wearing a thick woolly jumper that made her legs, clad in stretchy black leggings, look extra-long and dainty.
Toes with strawberry-red nails. She’d agreed to live in a period property on the condition that Caleb would pay for underfloor heating.
Reminded of it, I decided to slip off my shoes after all.
‘Thank you, lovely,’ she said, cradling the wrong mug in her hands. ‘This is just what I need.’
‘Sugar’s in this one,’ I said, joining her and handing her the other mug.
‘Ah, even better.’
‘And thank you ,’ I said, smiling as I brushed my fingertips against the violet-blue petals.
‘I know you like them.’ She held her hands, hot from the mug, over mine, her rings glinting in the winter daylight leaking through the window.
Beneath hers, my own fingers were bare except for a plain gold band.
Noah had suggested we pick out an engagement ring together after he’d proposed, but at the time I hadn’t felt I needed one, and when he’d got his own plain gold band, I liked that we matched.
I took a sip of tea and pressed the soles of my feet against the warm wooden floor. ‘So, where did you say Caleb was again?’
‘Oh, they’re shooting a video for that Willesden indie group I told you about.’
‘Very cool.’
She drank some tea and licked her lips, which were cracked from the cold. As she leant back on her chair and reached into the drawer of a large dresser for a mini tin of Vaseline, she said she had something to tell me, actually.
‘What is it?’