Why had this conversation just come back to me, tonight of all nights? It was 14 February 2009. The second Saturday in February. Valentine’s Day, in case you hadn’t noticed. The water and the lights of Sydney harbour were shimmering behind me, and I was dining alone since my father had, for various weird reasons of his own, refused to come out with me, even though this was my last evening in Australia, and the only reason for me visiting Australia in the first place had been to see him and try to rebuild my relationship with him. Right now, in fact, I was probably feeling more alone than I had ever felt in my life, and what really brought it home to me was the sight of the Chinese woman and her daughter playing cards together at their restaurant table. They looked so happy in each other’s company. There was such a connection between them. They weren’t talking very much, and when they did talk, it was about their card game, as far as I could tell, but that didn’t matter. It was all in their eyes, their smiles, the way they kept laughing, the way they kept leaning in to each other. By comparison, none of the diners at the other tables seemed to be having any fun. Sure, they were all laughing and talking too. But they didn’t seem to be entirely absorbed in each other, the way the Chinese woman and her daughter did. There was a couple sitting opposite me, out on a Valentine’s Day date by the looks of it: he kept checking his watch, she kept checking her mobile for text messages. Behind me there was a family of four: the two little boys were playing on their Nintendo DSs, and the husband and wife hadn’t spoken to each other for about ten minutes. To the left of me, slightly blocking my view of the waterfront, was a group of six friends: two of them were involved in this big argument which had started out as a discussion of global warming, and now seemed to have more to do with economics; neither of them was giving any ground, while the other four sat there in bored silence, looking on. An elderly couple on the other side of me had chosen to sit side by side at their table, rather than opposite each other, so that they could both look at the view instead of talking. None of this depressed me, exactly. I dare say that all of these people would go home thinking that they’d had a perfectly enjoyable night out. But it was only the Chinese woman and her daughter that I really envied. It was clear that they had something precious: something that I wanted badly. Something that I wanted to share in.
How could I be sure that she was Chinese? Well, I couldn’t. But she looked Chinese, to me. She had long black hair, slightly wild and unkempt. A thin face, with prominent cheekbones. (Sorry, I am just not very good at describing people.) Bright red lipstick, which struck me as an odd touch. A lovely smile, slightly tight-lipped but all the brighter for that, somehow. She was expensively dressed, with some sort of black chiffon scarf (I am not very good at describing clothes either – are you looking forward to the next 300 pages?), held in place with a large golden brooch. So she was well-off. Elegant – that would be a good word to describe her. Very elegant. Her daughter was well dressed too, and also had black hair (well, you don’t get many Chinese blondes), and seemed to be about eight or nine years old. She had a beautiful laugh: it started as a throaty chuckle and then bubbled up into a series of giggles which cascaded and finally died away like a stream tumbling down a hillside into a series of pools. (Just like the ones Mum and I used to walk past whenever she took me for a walk on the Lickey Hills, all those years ago, at the back of The Rose and Crown pub, on the edge of the municipal golf course. I suppose that’s what her laugh reminded me of, and perhaps that’s another of the reasons why the Chinese girl and her mother made such an impression on me that evening.) I don’t know what was making her laugh so much: something to do with the card game, which wasn’t a really silly, childish one like snap, but didn’t seem to be very serious or grown-up either. Perhaps they were playing knock-out whist or something like that. Whatever it was, it was making the little girl laugh, and her mother was playing along with her laughter, encouraging it, joining in, surfing on its waves. It was such a pleasure to look at them, but I had to ration my glances, in case they noticed that I was looking and the Chinese woman decided that I was some kind of creep. Once or twice she had noticed me looking at her and she had held my gaze for a couple of seconds, but it wasn’t long enough, I couldn’t read any kind of invitation into it and after those couple of seconds she looked away and she and her daughter would start talking and laughing again, quickly rebuilding that wall of intimacy, that protective screen.
Right at that moment, I would have liked to text Stuart, but I didn’t have his mobile number any more. I would have liked to text him to say that I understood, now, what it was that he’d been trying to tell me about cars. Cars are like people. We mill around every day, we rush here and there, we come within inches of touching each other but very little real contact goes on. All those near misses. All those might-have-beens. It’s frightening, when you think about it. Probably best not to think about it at all.
Can you remember where you were the day that John Smith died? I suspect that most people can’t. In fact I suspect that many people can’t even remember who John Smith was. Well, there have been a lot of John Smiths, of course, over the years, but the one I’m thinking of was the leader of the British Labour Party, who died of a heart attack in 1994. I realize his death doesn’t have the global resonance of a JFK or a Princess Diana, but I can still remember where I was, with absolute clarity. I was in the canteen of that department store in Ealing, having my lunch. Stuart was with me, and two or three other guys including one called Dave, who was an absolute pain in the arse. He worked in Electrical Goods and was just the kind of man I can’t stand. Loud and boring and much too sure of himself. And sitting at the table next to ours, all by herself, was this lovely woman in her early twenties with shoulder-length, light-brown hair, who looked lonely and out of place and kept glancing in our direction. Her name (as I was to find out, soon enough) was Caroline.
I’d only been working at this department store for a month or two. Before then I’d spent two or three years on the road selling toys for a company based in St Albans. It was a nice enough job, in a way. I became good friends with the other South-eastern rep, Trevor Paige, and we had some great times together, in those two or three years, but I never enjoyed being on the road as much as he did, and it wasn’t long before the novelty of all that travelling had well and truly worn off. I started looking for a chance to settle down. I’d recently put down the deposit on a nice little terraced house in Watford (not far from Trevor’s, as it happened) and was keeping my eyes open for a new job opportunity. The store in Ealing had always been one of my regular calling-points and I’d also made it my business to become friendly with Stuart, who ran the toy department. There’s always something rather artificial, I suppose, about friendships formed for business reasons, but Stuart and I did genuinely grow to like each other, and after a while I tried to make sure that Ealing would be my last call of the day, so that we could go out for a quick drink together after we’d had our meeting. And then one evening Stuart called me at home, outside work hours, and told me that he was being promoted to a job in the office upstairs, and he invited me to apply for his job running the toy department. Well, I hesitated at first, worrying how Trevor was going to react; but in the event, he was fine about it. He knew that it was just what I’d been looking for. So a couple of months later, I found myself working in Ealing full-time, and having lunch every day in the canteen with Stuart and his colleagues, and that was when I started to notice this lovely woman in her early twenties with light-brown hair who always seemed to be eating lunch by herself at the next table.