Read Between You and Me Online
Authors: Lisa Hall
‘Good, good. Please, Charlie, when it’s just us, do call me Stan. I wanted to thank you for a very pleasant evening on Friday, and to send my regards to Sal. It was very kind to rustle up another starter for me on Friday evening; I’m just sorry that Sal wasn’t made aware before.’
‘Honestly, Stan, it was no trouble. We are just so glad that you and Stella enjoyed yourselves.’ I want to grab hold of him and plead with him to tell me if I’m going to make it or not, whether he has decided if I make the grade.
‘I’d like to invite you and Sal to dinner, Charlie. When do you think you’ll have the Pavlenco buy-out wrapped up?’
‘Not long. A few weeks, maybe? There are just a few last-minute things to be agreed. Once I’ve got them all signed off the final paperwork will be ready to be prepared.’ I smile at him, hoping he can’t hear my heart pounding.
‘Excellent. Let’s say the Friday after you’ve wrapped up. Say, the twenty-eighth of next month?’ He peers at my desk calendar over the top of his glasses.
‘That sounds perfect, Stan. I’ll get Sal to put it in the diary.’ He nods briskly and strides off back to his office. I have to sit on my hands to resist the urge to punch the air.
YES. It is all finally coming together.
The encounter with Mr Hunter keeps me on a high for the rest of the morning, and I forget all about Radu Popescu and his phone calls until Anita pokes her head in a couple of hours later.
‘Charlie, that Popescu guy has been on the phone again. I told him you were in a meeting and couldn’t be disturbed but I had to tell him you were discussing Pavlenco to get him off the phone. He said to let you know he’s sent you an email and it’s important you check it as soon as possible.’
‘Thanks, Anita,’ I sigh. He’s persistent, if nothing else. Something to be admired, I suppose. ‘Leave it with me. I promise I’ll deal with him today.’ She disappears back to her desk, littered with an ever-growing number of photos of grandchildren, all with the same green eyes and red hair that Anita has. I click on my email icon and scroll through. This guy is clearly not going to leave me alone until I at least respond to him in one form or another and I have to hand it to him: he knows persistence works. Finally, I come across an email with LUCIAN PAVLENCO in the title.
From: [email protected]
Monday 22
nd
June 2015 8.59am
Subject: LUCIAN PAVLENCO
Dear C Trevetti,
My name is Radu Popescu. I am trying to speak with you about Lucian Pavlenco. I have important things to tell you and I think you need to listen to me. Lucian Pavlenco is not who you think he is. He is not what you think he is. I have tried to call you but you won’t speak to me. Please contact me – this is very urgent. I hope I do not have to call you again; you need to know these things that I must tell you.
Regards,
Radu Popescu
I read and reread the email several times. Although the English is good, I can tell it is written by someone who doesn’t speak English as his or her first language. This ties in with what Anita was saying about him having an accent. Could this possibly be someone who knew Lucian before he came to Britain? Maybe someone who holds a grudge against him? In all honesty, the guy sounds like a bit of a crackpot, and I can’t see what he has to tell me about Lucian that most people don’t already know. Lucian is a high-profile businessman who has had his fair share of lurid tales told about him, all of which have come to nothing. I decide to send one email to Radu Popescu, in the hope that once he has a formal response from me he’ll get the message and back off.
From: [email protected]
Monday 22
nd
June 2015 10.13am
Re: LUCIAN PAVLENCO
Dear Mr Popescu,
I apologise for my delay in responding to you. Unfortunately I deal only with Mr Pavlenco as regards business matters; therefore I do not think your information will be relevant to myself, or my company. Please refer any information you may have regarding Mr Pavlenco to Mr Pavlenco’s office address directly.
Yours sincerely,
C Trevetti
Ignoring the niggle of unease burrowing away at the back of my mind, I hit the send button, and forward a copy over to Anita’s email address. I breathe a sigh of relief, and hope that this will be the end of Mr Radu Popescu and his ‘highly important information’.
SAL
After the way you spoke about me in front of Mr and Mrs Hunter at the dinner party on Friday night, and the way you sulked like a little child all weekend, I am not feeling too gracious, especially not when I am woken by a telephone call from you, babbling about how the dinner party turned out to be a success in the end. Add into the mix that you can apologise for a little thing like waking me up, but not for accusing me of ruining your career – when, if anything, I’ve done you a favour – it’s little wonder I feel ungracious. Why do you do that? If you apologise to me when you’re wrong, do you think I then have some sort of power over you? That you’re losing your control over me? Whatever it is, I don’t think I’ll ever understand it. It’s like someone flips a coin and, whatever side it lands on, that’s the mood I get treated to, and I just seem to find it more and more difficult to keep up with the switches from good to bad – it’s not easy any more to just write it off when you’ve accused me of all sorts, told me how useless I am and how I don’t deserve you, and then the next minute everything is rosy, like nothing ever happened. Eventually you hang up and I lie back down on the fluffy pillows, just for two more minutes. I can’t sleep at the moment – it seems that every time we reach this phase in the never-ending, exhausting cycle we are trapped in, the insomnia returns for another bout, each one sharper than the last. I can’t get excited for you about Mr Hunter being a fan of the dinner party, however hard I try. You spoke about me like I was nothing to you, like I was a piece of dirt on your shoe in front of other people, and each time this happens I am finding it harder and harder to forgive you. Especially when there are other people around me, telling me I’m not as useless and pathetic as you would have me believe.
Pulling myself together, I get out of bed and look for Maggie. I can hear her in the dining room, high, childish tones singing the
Dora the Explorer
theme tune. I poke my head around the door, and there she is, sitting under the dining room table, singing, with a large teddy bear playing the part of Swiper the Fox. She runs over to me and squeezes my legs, and I wish she would never get any older.
‘Morning, chipmunk.’ I scoop her up and kiss her baby-soft curls, so like mine, inhaling the sleepy scent of her.
‘Good morning,’ she says in a very serious tone, planting squidgy kisses on my cheek. I carry her through into the kitchen, even though she is too old to be carried really, and set about making some breakfast while Maggie sits at the table still humming the Dora song. I think about before, when we returned home from Egypt and I had more or less decided I was leaving. How differently things might have turned out if I had left then.
On our return home from Egypt you don’t say a word to me on the flight, despite my repeated attempts at starting a conversation. I have apologised again and again for whatever slight you think I made towards you in the Bedouin tent that evening, and I have made sure to avoid Amaryllis and her boyfriend for the rest of the holiday. Now, on the flight home, I refrain from making eye contact with anyone who looks like they might be up for having a conversation with a stranger, so there is no chance of you going off on one again. I am pretty much decided that when we get home I will speak to you – tell you that, while I love you very much, there is no way I want to continue like this – it’s not how I thought our relationship would be. I’ll move back in with my parents; it will mean a long commute to my new job, but it’s for the best. Things don’t happen that way, though. When we get in through the front door at our tiny new flat it’s like someone has flicked a switch – you can’t do enough for me, and you actually apologise.
‘I’m sorry, Sal, for how I was on holiday. It’s just – there was a whole new side to you. One I didn’t know existed before.’ You twine your fingers up into my hair. ‘I got jealous – I mean, look at you, Sal – you’re gorgeous, and I don’t want anyone else to ruin what we’ve got. It’s special. I just got worried that you didn’t want me any more.’ I weaken, beginning to think that maybe the problem is me – maybe I shouldn’t have spent my holiday talking to other people, when it was all supposed to be about you and me, spending quality time together before our jobs started. Maybe I didn’t pay you enough attention.
‘It’s OK, Charlie. I understand – maybe all the stuff that happened when you were growing up made you a bit insecure?’ I hint at your past, hoping that for once you might actually open up to me, instead of keeping it all locked away like you usually do.
‘Maybe.’ You brush it away, sweeping it under the carpet again. ‘I just don’t want to have that for us, you understand? I want us to have the perfect relationship. It’s you and me, Sal, always you and me, and I was thinking … now that we’ve got the flat, and we’ve both got proper jobs … we should get married.’
‘Is this a proposal? Are you serious?’
‘Deadly. Do you love me?’
‘Yes, Charlie, of course I do. It’s just … do you really want to? Get married?’
‘Yes, you idiot. I wouldn’t have said it otherwise, would I?’
‘Then bloody hell, Charlie, yes. Let’s get married!’ We laugh, each seemingly a little shocked by how easy that was, and you start making plans to go ring shopping. I am so happy – swept up in the idea of getting married, starting our own little family. It is everything I have ever wanted. I can see us getting old together, taking care of our children, then our grandchildren. I know it’s not all going to be plain sailing, that there are bound to be little blips like we had on holiday, but if I can give you the kind of life that my parents have given each other, as opposed to whatever happened in your family between your parents when you were growing up, then I’ll be happy. Egypt seems like a distant memory already. It’s almost as though I have already chosen to forget the arguments and cold-shoulder behaviour, and to focus instead on remembering the brilliant sunshine, the warmth of the sun on my back, the tiny fish swimming beneath the pier.
We start to make plans for a small, simple wedding. You don’t have anyone in your family you want to invite, and when I ask you about inviting your mum you bite my head off.
‘Jesus, Sal. Leave it. You’ve got no idea what went on, and you’ve got no idea what kind of a person she is, so drop it, OK? I just don’t want her there.’
I don’t push it as I don’t want to cause any arguments, but when it turns out you don’t even really want anyone from my family there either, I am upset and hurt. I can’t leave it and have to say something, and eventually you realise that, if you don’t give in, you’ll be completely outnumbered.
‘Charlie, it’s my mum and dad, my sisters. I have to have them there.’
‘It’s supposed to be about you and me. The start of our new life together, not the start of our lives together with your mum and dad.’
I want to ask you: what kind of weirdo gets married without their parents there? Their family? But given that you have invited a couple of people you work with and that’s it, I can’t say a word. You concede begrudgingly in the end that there will be invitations sent out to my parents, Julia and Luca, Anna and Paola. You don’t want to invite any of our old friends from uni, and none of the embarrassingly few friends we have picked up since we moved into our little flat and new jobs. I’m gutted that some of my old uni friends aren’t invited, but I don’t push it, just in case you decide you want to retract the invitations to my family.
The day goes off without a hitch. You are polite to my family, despite not wanting them there. When the registrar pronounces us ‘Mr and Mrs Trevetti’, amidst the sound of the cheers you whisper into my ear, ‘Together, for ever.’ The sun disappears behind a cloud, casting a dark shadow across the day and I shiver.
Things do not go swimmingly as we embark on married life together. You tell me that, now we are married, I don’t need to have contact with my family, that you are my family now. At first I fight hard against you, telling you that just because you don’t get along with your family doesn’t mean we should have to be without mine. I try to explain how our family behaved when we were growing up and how I want you to be a part of it all. You are stubborn and won’t budge, telling me that maybe, if they are more important to me, then perhaps we shouldn’t have got married at all? Perhaps we should call it a day now, before we get too settled. I can go back to living with my parents and you can find someone else, someone who will really appreciate all that you do for them, instead of being ungrateful and fighting against you all the time. As much as I hate being told what to do and whom to see, especially if it means little contact with my family, the thought of you being with someone else, someone who is not me, makes me feel sick. So, I agree to reduce the contact with my family down to one phone call a week to my mum, the minimum I can get away with without causing fuss, without my mum turning up on the doorstep to see what’s wrong. In reality, I just wait until you’re working late before giving her a quick ring before you get home, or I pop over there for an hour when it’s half-term and I am at home for the week.
I find that, once you have your own way, life is a lot more settled. If I do as I am told and don’t question you, there are no rows, no shouting, no accusations. Until we find out that we are going to have a baby.
The day we find out for certain that Maggie is on the way you are furious.
‘How the fuck could you let this happen, Sal?’ Your lips are a thin line of fury, anger blazing in your eyes. The positive pregnancy test sits on the coffee table between us, neither of us willing to look at it.