Losing You Read Free Page B

very well. I’ve tried, but he’s a blur, a half-remembered face. We had a drink together a few times. I think I once went to his house and had a meal with lots of other people there. He says we danced together more than once; he swears he once put his arm round me when we were in a pub by the river. A few weeks ago, he showed me a photograph of himself as a student, his thin face, the tumble of dark hair, the cigarette in the corner of his mouth. I studied it and felt desire stir in me for the youth he was then, but at the time I had felt nothing like that. He was a figure I passed on the road and, though we promised to keep in touch, we hadn’t really. He sent me a postcard from a conference he was at in Mexico several years ago, and it took me a few seconds to work out who ‘Christian’, signed with an inky flourish under a couple of lines I could hardly decipher, actually was. Two years ago I heard from a mutual acquaintance that the relationship he’d been in had broken up and I thought then of getting in touch, but I never did. I sent him a change-of-address card when we moved to Sandling Island, but assumed it would never reach him. I wasn’t even sure where he lived any more.
    Six months ago, he called me up out of the blue to say he was going to be in East Anglia for a conference, and maybe we could meet. I almost made an excuse. Rory had left in a maelstrom of tears, unpaid bills, smashed dreams, and I felt lonely, bewildered, reclusive and sad. By that time, I had already had a forlorn, short-lived fling, and I knew it wasn’t the answer to anything. Certainly not to loneliness, certainly not to sadness. All I really wanted was to spend time with the children, and when I wasn’t doing that, to work on the house and the small, nettle-filled garden. I was trying to create a tiny haven for us, filled with the smell of fresh paint and baking, and I didn’t really want to make an effort for a man I used to know but who was now a half-remembered stranger.
    In the end, I arranged to meet him because I couldn’t think of a reason not to quickly enough. I told him as much at the end of that first meeting, because even by then – two and a half hours in – I wanted to be honest with him. I felt I could trust him. He didn’t seem to be trying to impress me or pretend in any way to be someone he wasn’t. Had he always been like that, I wondered – and why hadn’t I noticed?
    He was still slim, still boyish-looking, but his unruly hair was shorter and streaked with grey, and there were crow’s feet round his eyes and brackets round his mouth. I tried to fit this fortyish face with the smooth, eager one from the past, and I could feel him doing the same with me. Our ghosts were with us. We walked along the sea wall, with the tide going out and the lovely light of a May early evening gradually thickening into dusk, and we talked or sometimes were silent. He told me the names of the birds that glided on the currents, although as an islander I was the one who should have known. But that became part of the flirtatious joke. He came back and had a glass of wine at my house; he played a computer game with Jackson (and lost), and when he met Charlie, who burst into the room with mud on her shoes and a dangerous glint in her eyes, he was gravely friendly without being sycophantic or matey. He rang me almost as soon as he had left the house. He told me he was crossing the causeway and the water was nearly over the road, and would I invite him for dinner the next day? He would bring the pudding and the wine, and what did the children like to eat?
    I set off once more, turning inland, to drive through the centre of the town, past the shops and the church, the garage, the old people’s home, the garden centre; past the building that had been going to be Rory’s seafood restaurant and now had a ‘To Let’ sign swinging in the wind above its blank windows. I already felt slightly detached from it all, as if I were five