The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim Read Free Page A

couldn’t even begin to guess what had brought her here.
    She gave me the explanation for that on our first date, and a very sad story it turned out to be. We were in a branch of Spaghetti House (one of my favourite chains, back in those days, though you don’t see so many of them any more) and while Caroline picked at her tagliatelle carbonara she told me that, when she was at university in Manchester, she’d got quite deeply involved with this man who was studying English in the same year as her. Then he’d got a job in London, working in a TV production company, so they’d both moved down and found themselves a flat in Ealing. Caroline’s real ambition was to write books – novels and short stories – so she took this job in the department store as a temporary thing, trying to get on with her writing in the evening and at weekends. Meanwhile, her boyfriend started an affair with someone he’d met at the production company, and fell madly in love with her, and within a couple of weeks he’d dumped Caroline and moved out, and she was left all by herself, living somewhere where she had no friends and doing a job in which she had no interest.
    Well, the truth is obvious enough now, isn’t it? There’s a phrase, a cliché, for the state Caroline was in, back then: on the rebound. She liked me because I was being kind to her, and because I’d caught her at a low ebb, and because I probably wasn’t quite as crass and insensitive as the other guys in the canteen. But there’s no denying, in retrospect, that I was out of her league. In a way it’s amazing that we lasted as long as we did. But of course, you can’t see into the future. I usually have trouble seeing a couple of weeks ahead, never mind fifteen years. Back then, we were young and naive and at the end of that evening in the Spaghetti House, when I asked her if she’d like to drive out into the country with me at the weekend, neither of us had the slightest idea where it would lead and all I can remember now is the shining light of gratitude in her eyes as she said Yes.
    Fifteen years ago. Is fifteen years a long time, or a short time? I suppose everything is relative. Set against the history of mankind, fifteen years is just the blink of an eye, but it also seemed that I had travelled a long way, an unimaginably long way, from the hope and excitement of that faraway first date in the Spaghetti House to the evening a few months ago, 14 February 2009, when (at the age of forty-eight) I found myself sitting alone at a restaurant in Australia, the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering behind me, and I couldn’t stop staring at the beautiful Chinese woman and her little daughter who were playing cards together at their table. Caroline had left home by then. Walked out, I mean. She had been gone six months and she had taken our daughter, Lucy, with her. They had moved up north, to Kendal in the Lake District. What was it, finally, that drove her away? Just a long-standing build-up of frustration, I suppose. Apart from the birth of Lucy, it seemed that the last fifteen years hadn’t brought Caroline any of the things she’d been hoping for. The great novel remained unwritten. She hadn’t even managed to finish a short story, so far as I knew. Lucy’s arrival had put paid to a lot of that. Motherhood is pretty demanding, after all. I certainly couldn’t see why being married to me should stop her from writing anything, if that’s what she really wanted to do. Another thing that occurs to me is that Caroline might, deep down (and this is a painful thing to admit) have been a little bit ashamed of me. Of my job, to be more precise. I’d moved on, by now, to one of the biggest and most prestigious department stores in central London, where I was employed as an After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer. It was an excellent job, as far as I could see. But maybe there was a part of her that thought the husband of an aspiring writer should do something