At his open door she saw he was reading while eating a sandwich. Small pieces of lettuce were scattered over his papers, and as she watched he brushed them absently onto the floor.
She knocked. ‘Mark?’
‘I’m busy, Chloe.’
God, you can be a self-important prick at times, Mark, she thought to herself. But she bit her lip and said instead, ‘I just need a second.’
He sighed and looked up. ‘What is it?’
‘About Julia…’ She had so many questions she didn’t know where to start.
Mark was alert at once when he realised she was ready to talk. ‘What did Alex say to you?’
‘Nothing as yet,’ she admitted reluctantly.
‘Nothing? Didn’t you ask him?’
‘Not really. He was upset, then my mother called, with her usual impeccable timing…’
‘I couldn’t care less how upset he is. What I want to know is What Did He Do to Julia?’
‘Why do you think he did something to her?’ Chloe defended, alarmed now. The thought had never crossed her mind. Alex wouldn’t, couldn’t harm anyone or anything, surely. ‘What if she did something to him?’
‘I somehow doubt it.’
‘This is ridiculous.’ Chloe’s patience was suddenly worn paper-thin. ‘Why don’t you just ask her? I certainly don’t intend to interrogate Alex for you. I trust him, Mark – not that I expect you to know about that, of course.’ She couldn’t help the bitterness creeping in and she was infuriated with herself.
‘I can’t ask her, Chloe!’ Mark’s voice was oddly pitched. ‘I’ve only got a bloody address, and after last night I hardly feel welcome to pop round. So I expect I’ll never see her again, thanks to your fucking husband. Now, can I eat my lunch in peace?’
Silently, Chloe headed for the door. She passed Jana on the way back to her office, which was next door to Mark’s, divided only by a small stationery cupboard. The partition walls were useless – you could hear any noise above normal speaking tone, and she knew that the gaggle of secretaries that formed the centre pool in the nucleus of surrounding offices had probably heard that last line, as she was un ceremoniously thrown out. Her cheeks burned, and she avoided looking at them. When she’d closed her own office door, she sat down and took deep breaths.
Despite the confrontation, Mark’s last words had comforted her. What a fool she was. Why hadn’t she realised that Julia and Mark weren’t necessarily in the kind of relationship he’d made it out to be? If he only had an address and had never been there, things with Julia obviously hadn’t progressed very far. Just because he’d prattled on about her in the few days before their dinner date didn’t mean anything.
Julia had certainly raced off like a frightened rabbit last night. Maybe she’d taken off completely. If she would just vanish, then maybe they could pretend that last night had never happened.
Perhaps this should have been a comfort to her, but it wasn’t.
7
When Julia opened her eyes it was to cold white light streaming in through the uncurtained window. She’d slept fitfully through the night and for most of the morning, but even in her semi-conscious slumber she couldn’t forget what had happened last night. She could barely remember the journey home. When she had run out of the restaurant and looked at the faces of those around her, she was surprised no one was staring. It was unbelievable that she was convincing amongst them, these strangers – just one of them – so ordinary that they hardly noticed her.
She kept trying to replay the time she had seen him from start to finish, breaking the few seconds down into milliseconds so she could savour each micro-moment. His head turning to look at her; his expression opening in recognition, then closing a moment later before he lost control and let something out of himself that wasn’t meant to be revealed. His hand automatically reaching towards hers. The warmth of his touch against her fingers, his grip lingering, testing out this new reality, involuntarily preserving the link between them for a short, extended fraction of time. Even before he had released the grip she had wanted him to hold on – it was real to her in a way she had forgotten a touch could be. But he had broken the small tie their fingers had forged, and watching him turn away had been more than she could bear. She was surprised that she managed to excuse herself; that she hadn’t just evaporated next to the others. Her heart had pounded so hard she’d been sure it was about to break through her chest cavity. It had felt like she was shrinking suddenly, tunnelling down a hole that only she could see, away from everyone and everything.
It was so unbearably ironic. She hadn’t been back to England for more than a few months in the past ten years, and she and Alex were both from the Midlands, so why he was living here in London she didn’t know.
Except there was one big reason, wasn’t there.
His wife. Alex was married.
She had always imagined that seeing Alex again would be more painful than anything else she could experience. But she had been wrong, because stupidly, stupidly, she had never added Alex’s wife into that equation. It had never occurred to her that Alex could have, would have married. Because Alex already had a soul mate, and he had lost her.
The thought of him having such incredible intimacy with another woman made it difficult to breathe.
Chloe. She tried to think back to what Mark had briefly told her about Chloe and Alex before they arrived for dinner. Not much. He had mentioned Chloe’s husband by name, she recalled, but she had never dreamed that it could be her Alex.
Except it wasn’t ‘her Alex’ any more.
She grabbed her coat and headed for the door, making her way down the tiny narrow stairway that led from the cramped flat. The carpet was worn and rucked in places, there was no banister and she had already nearly tripped once or twice, so now she rested her hand on the wall as she went. At the bottom she pushed open the half-rotten door of peeling white paint, which opened into a small courtyard, and hurried through, not glancing at the doors to the left and right, which, she’d concluded, from the amount of loud music, shopping trolleys and the smell of pot around the place, must be largely inhabited by students. The little alleyway was a dark oasis of calm, despite its sinister shadows, before she suddenly merged onto a busy street, a teeming multicolour of bicycles, people, umbrellas, buses and taxis all heading in their own directions.
Head down against the crowds and the rain and the cold, she walked briskly along the road until she saw the orange strip of an internet café. She went in, exchanged coins for a ticket, and took her place at a computer.
Once logged on she wasted no time in finding a search engine and typing in ‘Alex Markham’.
The very first page that came up was his website. Her damp cheeks were still stinging from the sudden transition from the cool air outside to the warmth indoors, as she held her breath and went straight to it, looking through the pages, fascinated by the designs she found in front of her. It was like reading a storybook and suddenly skipping forward one hundred pages in an instant. At the last juncture she had known about, Alex had been one of a promising mass of recently graduated graphic artists, but now she suddenly zipped forward so many years to see that he had fulfilled his talent, or at least had begun to. He was doing what he had always wanted to do.
Anger rose up in her. She had had a passion for journalism a long time ago. She had wanted to do a post-grad course and then throw herself headlong into the profession, making a name for herself on a paper or magazine. Instead, she had spent the past ten years drifting round the world doing odd jobs, not wanting or daring to go home, sending off the occasional travel log from somewhere remote and beautiful, and even more occasionally being contacted by an editor – once or twice even being paid, only to find that most of her articles were simply kept on file and never actually appeared.