Dick and Barry ask us if we want to go with them to the pub for a quick one, but it’s hard to imagine us all sitting round a table laughing about the customer who confused Albert King with Albert Collins (“He didn’t even twig when he was looking at the record for scratches and he saw the Stax label,” Barry told us, shaking his head at the previously unsuspected depths of human ignorance), and I politely decline. I presume that we’re going back to the flat, so I walk toward the bus stop, but Laura tugs me on the arm and wheels around to look for a cab.
“I’ll pay. It wouldn’t be much fun on the twenty-nine, would it?”
Fair point. The conversation we need to have is best conducted without a conductor—and without dogs, kids, and fat people with huge John Lewis bags.
We’re pretty quiet in the cab. It’s only a ten-minute ride from the Seven Sisters Road to Crouch End, but the journey is so uncomfortable and intense and unhappy that I feel I’ll remember it for the rest of my life. It’s raining, and the fluorescent lights make patterns on our faces; the taxi driver asks us if we’ve had a good day, and we grunt, and he slams the partition shut behind him. Laura stares out of the window, and I sneak the odd look at her, trying to see if the last week has made any difference in her face. She’s had her hair cut, same as usual, very short, sixties short, like Mia Farrow, except—and I’m not just being creepy—she’s better suited to this sort of cut than Mia. It’s because her hair is so dark, nearly black, that when it’s short her eyes seem to take up most of her face. She’s not wearing any makeup, and I reckon this is for my benefit. It’s an easy way of showing me that she’s careworn, distracted, too miserable for fripperies. There’s a nice symmetry here: when I gave her that tape with the Solomon Burke song on it, all those years ago, she was wearing loads of makeup, much more than she was used to wearing, and much more than she had worn the previous week, and I knew, or hoped, that this was for my benefit, too. So you get loads at the beginning, to show that things are good, positive, exciting, and none at the end, to show that things are desperate. Neat, eh?
(But later, just as we’re turning the corner into my road, and I’m beginning to panic about the pain and difficulty of the impending conversation, I see a woman on her own, Saturday-night-smart, off to meet somebody somewhere, friends, or a lover. And when I was living with Laura, I missed … what? Maybe I missed somebody traveling on a bus or tube or cab, going out of thier way, to meet me, maybe dressed up a little, maybe wearing more makeup than usual, maybe even slightly nervous; when I was younger, the knowledge that I was responsible for any of this, even the bus ride, made me feel pathetically grateful. When you’re with someone permanently, you don’t get that: if Laura wanted to see me, she only had to turn her head, or walk from the bathroom to the bedroom, and she never bothered to dress up for the trip. And when she came home, she came home because she lived in my flat, not because we were lovers, and when we went out, she sometimes dressed up and sometimes didn’t, depending on where we were going, but again, it was nothing whatsoever to do with me. Anyway, all this is by way of saying that the woman I saw out of the cab window inspired me and consoled me, momentarily: maybe I am not too old to provoke a trip from one part of London to another, and if I ever do have another date, and I arrange to meet that date in, say, Islington, and she has to come all the way from Stoke Newington, a journey of some three to four miles, I will thank her from the bottom of my wretched thirty-five-year-old heart.)
Laura pays the cabbie and I unlock the front door, put the timer light on, and usher her inside. She stops and goes through the post on the windowsill, just through force of habit, I guess, but of course she gets herself in difficulties immediately: as she’s shuffling through the envelopes, she comes across Ian’s TV license reminder, and she hesitates, just for a second, but long enough to remove any last remaining trace of doubt from my mind, and I feel sick.
“You can take it with you if you want,” I say, but I can’t look at her, and she doesn’t look at me. “Save me having to redirect it.” But she just puts it back in the pile, and then puts the pile back among the takeaway menus and minicab cards on the windowsill, and starts walking up the stairs.
When we get into the flat, it’s weird seeing her there. But what’s particularly odd is how she tries to avoid doing the things that she used to do, you can see her checking herself. She takes her coat off; she used to chuck it over one of the chairs, but she doesn’t want to do that tonight. She stands there holding it for a little while, and I take it off her and chuck it over one of the chairs. She starts to go into the kitchen, either to put the kettle on or to pour herself a glass of wine, so I ask her, politely, whether she’d like a cup of tea, and she asks me, politely, whether there’s anything stronger, and when I say that there’s a half-empty bottle of wine in the fridge, she manages not to say that there was a whole one when she left, and she bought it. Anyway, it’s not hers any more, or it’s not the same bottle, or something. And when she sits down, she chooses the chair nearest the stereo—my chair—rather than the one nearest the TV—her chair.
“Have you done them yet?” She nods toward the shelves full of albums.
“What?” I know what, of course.
“The Great Reorganization.” I can hear the capital letters.
“Oh. Yes. The other night.” I don’t want to tell her that I did it the evening after she’d gone, but she gives an irritating little, well-fancy-that smile anyway.
“What?” I say. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Nothing. Just, you know. Didn’t take you long.”
“Don’t you think there are more important things to talk about than my record collection?”
“Yes, I do, Rob. I’ve always thought that.”
I’m supposed to have the moral high ground here (she’s the one who’s been sleeping with the neighbours, after all), but I can’t even get out of base camp.
“Where have you been staying for the last week?”
“I think you know that,” she says quietly.
“Had to work it out for myself, though, didn’t I?”
I feel sick again, really sick. I don’t know how it shows on my face, but suddenly Laura loses it a little: she looks tired, and sad, and she stares hard straight ahead to stop herself from crying.
“I’m sorry. I made some bad decisions. I haven’t been very fair to you. That’s why I came to the shop this evening, because I thought it was time to be brave.”
“Are you scared now?”
“Yes, of course I am. I feel terrible. This is really hard, you know.”
“Good.”
Silence. I don’t know what to say. There are loads of things I want to ask, but they are all questions I don’t really want answered: when did you start seeing Ian, and was it because of the, you know, the ceiling noise thing, and is it better (What? she’d ask; Everything, I’d say), and is this really definitely it, or just some sort of phase, and, this is how feeble I’m becoming, have you missed me at all even one bit, do you love me, do you love him, do you want to end up with him, do you want to have babies with him, and is it better, is it better. IS IT BETTER?