Lifesaver (33 page)

‘So, I’ll be back on Wednesday. Let’s try for a day the following week for the spa, shall we, when Peter can babysit?’ At least if we went to a health spa, I wouldn’t be able to drink, I thought. Going to a bar would have been a disaster - Vicky sitting there with her one pregnancy-permitted glass of wine, whilst I tipped back the rest of the bottle and got utterly tangled up in my own web of deceit. She’d have worked the secrets out of me in half an hour, with the ease of a masseuse easing knots from a shoulder blade.

‘That should be fine. We could go to that posh place up the road - the Ivy Spa. And I look forward to hearing all about the job then,’ she said, in that same blank tone.

We said our goodbyes, and as I put the phone away in my bag I turned to see Adam and Max standing expectantly by the exit turnstile. I walked towards them, and they both beamed at me.

‘I’ve got your stuff,’ said Adam. ‘Why don’t you go and get changed, and then we’ll go home, shall we?’

When I emerged from the changing room, they were there, waiting for me, as if it had never been any other way.

I pushed open the door of
A Taste Of the Orient
at five past eight the following evening, shoulders back, a beam on my face, and my hair in a pleasing shiny curtain. Ken was still in Singapore. I felt free.

Adam was sitting expectantly at a small table by the window, watching me arrive. He had shaved and trimmed his beard even shorter, I noticed, and wore a freshly-ironed button-down shirt, black jeans, and a broad smile. I was glad he wasn’t smartly dressed—after my rather OTT outfit of Saturday night, I’d decided to go casual for our date: my favourite Replay jeans, stiff and tight from the spin-dryer, wedge-soled sandals, and a pink t-shirt with a sequinned logo across my breasts.

He stood up as I approached, held out his arms and hugged me gently, kissing my cheek. I felt the sequins snag slightly on the buttons of his shirt. He was the first bearded man that I’d ever found attractive—apart from George Clooney, obviously - and I felt an unbidden stab of lust as I wondered what it would be like, to feel his facial hair rub against the tender hidden parts of my naked body; sequins against buttons… get a grip, Anna, I told myself, horrified. I supposed it was natural to be thinking about sex so much, since it had been such a long time since Ken had been able to face it—but surely I shouldn’t have been thinking about it with Adam! There was no way that I could have Adam. Although that was probably why I thought I wanted him so much.

A surprisingly lanky Chinese waiter popped up beside me. ‘Can oi get you a drink, zir; madam?’ he said, in the broadest of Wiltshire accents, pen poised over his pad.

Adam’s lips twitched, but he looked the waiter in the eye. ‘I’ll have a Singha beer, please.’

‘Zorry, zir, no Zingha. Only
Carrrrl
sberg.’

‘That’ll be fine.’

‘Same for me,’ I added. ‘And some prawn crackers, please.’

The waiter vanished again. Adam and I grinned at each other in the restaurant’s dim light, a tiny nightlight on our table just about illuminating our faces—due to the heavy wooden shutters at the windows, the room was extremely gloomy. I hadn’t even realized that there were several other couples dining with us—the place was as quiet as it was dark.

‘This place has weird acoustics,’ I whispered. ‘Listen…

We both cocked our ears, and giggled at the sound of magnified chewing noises, like cattle grazing. Not one of the other diners was talking, as if there had been some sort of mass quarrel taking place right before we’d walked in. I noticed through the gloom that our nearest neighbour had a plate of noodles sporting a shiny fried egg on top of it. There was something very surreal about the place.

‘Have you been here before?’ I asked, curious, and couldn’t help feeling relieved when Adam shook his head.

‘Pamela recommended it,’ he said, somewhat sheepishly. ‘Although who she came here with, I can’t imagine. Her mum, probably. She takes her out for lunch every now and again. But the food doesn’t exactly look spectacular, does it?’ We gazed at our neighbours’ egg-topped noodles, floating in an alarming puddle of grease.

The gangly waiter returned with our beers and crackers, and we ordered, studiously avoiding any mention of noodles. Then, since the heavy quiet in the restaurant was so unconducive to flowing conversation, we fell silent, gazing instead into one another’s eyes in a rather shameless way.

‘You’ve got beautiful eyes,’ said Adam shyly over the prawn crackers. ‘Really blue.’

‘They’re green, actually,’ I said. ‘
Yours
are blue. Yours are lovely.’ I glanced sideways at the couple on the next table, half-expecting them to make gagging noises at our soppy observations. But the man had began a sonorous, dish by dish monologue on the best meals he’d ever had; his wife nodding earnest assent throughout. The other diners eventually began to chat hesitantly too, as if someone had given them permission.

‘You’re very easy to talk to,’ Adam continued. ‘But you don’t talk about yourself much, do you? I feel like I know you so well already, without actually knowing anything about you…it’s strange.’

‘Well,’ I said, breaking the last prawn cracker in half and bracing myself. ‘What do you want to know?’

Adam broke the remaining half of cracker into another half, which he left in the basket for me.

‘Is there some kind of unwritten code of conduct in all Thai and Chinese restaurants, do you think, to the effect that it’s extremely bad form to be the one to finish the prawn crackers?’ I added, in an effort to postpone any interrogation. ‘People always do it, don’t they—keep taking bits of the last one, rather than just being the one to stuff it in whole.’

‘Polite people, anyway,’ Adam said, offering me the now-miniscule piece, barely more than a crumb, in the bottom of the basket. I laughed, and popped it in my mouth.

‘Thanks.’

‘So, tell me about yourself. Have you ever been married?’

Somehow him asking me outright made it feel more natural to answer truthfully. Kind of truthfully.

‘Yes. To a man called Ken. For six years.
’ Please don’t ask me when we split up.

But Adam had just gazed at me expectantly. ‘What happened?’

‘Well. I don’t know. I suppose we just grew apart—the old story. He travels—travelled—a lot. Works for a big record company, and when he isn’t—wasn’t—working, he was playing tennis. He’s a tennis fanatic.’

‘No kids, I assume?’

I swallowed hard, as the fragments of prawn cracker seemed to have reconstituted themselves into a viscous mass in my throat. The wallpaper in the restaurant was the obligatory flock, with green and silver raised patterns as thick as Fuzzy Felt farmyard animals. In my mind’s eye, I saw Holly at about eight months, rubbing her fat cheeks across those soft shapes and chuckling with delight.

‘No. That was part of the problem, really, I suppose. We—er—I mean, I had a few miscarriages, and then we lost a baby at birth. Holly.’

It was the first time I’d ever been able to just say it out loud, and although it sent ants marching up the back of my kidneys and made my breath shallow, I’d said it.

‘I’m so sorry,’ said Adam.

I took a swig of beer, but it didn’t stop my bottom lip trembling; vibrating against the edge of my glass as if I’d been trying to produce a tune. ‘Thanks. It was …a lot for a marriage to survive.’

He reached across the table and took my hand, interlacing our fingers as he had done the other night, rubbing his thumb into my palm, and then twisting each of my rings around until he came to the one on my fourth finger. ‘You still wear your wedding ring,’ he said, and I felt the roots of a blush begin to spread across my face.

‘But then, I still wear mine.’ He chinked his gently against mine, and it felt as if the ghosts of our partners stood at our shoulders then, disapproving. Two rings, four people, and one very guilty conscience.

There didn’t seem to be anything else to say, and for the first time our silence had a tinge of awkwardness about it. Our neighbour said: ‘Well of course there was that Harvester in Altringham. Lovely prawn cocktail, they did, and very reasonable too…’

I stared at a Chinese dragon hanging on the wall near our table. It had a lurid gold snarl, exaggerated cheeks and fangs, and spray-painted ears which were peeling like an old front door in the sun.

‘What’s the situation with Max’s mum, then?’ I asked eventually. ‘Although just say if you don’t want to talk about it; it’s not a problem.’

Adam grimaced and studied the dragon too, and I thought he was going to take me up on my offer. But he started to speak. He didn’t meet my eyes, although his fingers remained clasped in mine.

‘We were basically fine together for quite a long time, you know, rubbing along; until Max got ill, I suppose. There were a lot of tensions along the way, though, even back then—money worries, mainly. My job doesn’t pay well, and Marilyn worked as a legal secretary. It was a struggle, meeting the mortgage and buying all the baby stuff Max needed. So when Max was diagnosed, we decided that she ought to be the one to carry on working as much as she could, because she had the full-time job. I took unpaid leave from the college and basically just moved into the hospital to be with him. I slept there—lived there during the week—for about two years. Marilyn visited all the time, of course, and used to stay there instead of me at weekends, to give me a break. But the consequences were that we rarely spent any time together. If we tried to go out on a date, all we’d talk about was Max’s latest treatment and how he was responding. It completely took over our lives.’

‘Yes. I can see how it would,’ I said, my thumb meeting his in a swirly little dance. Our food arrived, but after giving it a perfunctory once-over to make sure fried eggs weren’t involved, we ignored it.

‘Then I realised that Marilyn was drinking quite heavily. I can’t blame her—the stress was horrendous—but it was just another reason she shut herself off from me. In the end we were barely talking. I started to get angry with her for losing the plot when Max so badly needed us to be strong. Which didn’t help, obviously. Finally, Max had the bone marrow transplant—‘

A thrill, almost sexual in its electrifying jolt, crackled up my back.

‘- and eventually got the all-clear. A week later, Marilyn packed her bags and left. I couldn’t believe it.’

‘You must have missed her terribly,’ I said sympathetically.

‘No, it wasn’t that. In fact I didn’t miss her at all. I meant that I couldn’t believe she’d walk out on him, after everything he’d been through. I was furious.’

‘How did Max take it?’

‘Pretty much as you’d think—he was devastated. But after the previous two years, I suppose he was used to pain and setbacks. He cried every night for a couple of weeks, and then gradually stopped asking for her. Now - it’s weird - he hardly ever mentions her.’

‘Where did she go?’

‘All over the place. She went travelling, said she needed to get her head together.’ He snorted bitterly. ‘We got postcards from various far-flung places, which I used to hide from Max because they only reminded him that she wasn’t there; and now apparently she’s back living near her mother in Leeds. The last thing I heard from her was that she missed Max like mad, but didn’t want to upset him by coming to see him after so long. I told her mum that she should come anyway, but that was about three months ago, and I haven’t heard anything since.’

‘That
is
weird,’ I said. ‘I absolutely cannot understand how anyone could abandon their child. Especially one as gorgeous as Max.’

Adam rewarded that with a faint smile. ‘So that’s my sorry tale,’ he said. ‘Now let’s eat, before this goes completely cold. I hate lukewarm sweet and sour, you can really taste the MSG.’

‘We’ve both got sorry tales, then, haven’t we?’

Adam’s smile got broader. ‘Maybe we should stick together, in that case,’ he said.

‘Like the noodles.’

‘Yes.’

I hadn’t noticed at which point he’d un-linked fingers with me, but once more he took my hand, knitting our fingers back together like carefully-darned socks.

‘You’re so gorgeous,’ he said abruptly. ‘I could look at you all day. I’m so glad we met.’

Tears flooded my eyes, blurring my plate of food. ‘Me too,’ I said, and I suddenly realized that I hadn’t been thinking about Max at all

‘Fancy a walk on the beach?’

I squinted at Adam, puzzled. Geography had never been my strong point but, the last time I looked, Gillingsbury was not on the coast.

‘It’s not far from here to the sea, about a twenty minute drive,’ he said. ‘I’ve only had two pints, and I don’t need to pick Max up from Mum’s until the morning. What do you think? I love hearing the sea. I’m sure I’ll live on the coast one day.’

I had a foolish vision of us buying a cosy cliffside cottage together, with thatch and a huge fireplace, like the one in Ireland in which Ken and I once stayed. It had been right on the main National Trust path up the cliff, and we’d had to be careful to draw the curtains whenever we made love, because hikers with flapping cagoules and dishevelled hair would peer in through the cottage windows as they passed, listing forwards at forty-five degree angles to the wind. I liked the idea that the only passing traffic would be on foot. Much better for Max’s frail lungs, all that sea air…

‘I’d love to go,’ I said.

True to Adam’s word, we were there within twenty minutes. He parked in an empty wind-blown cliff-top carpark.

‘There’s a path down there,’ he said, pointing towards the beach. ‘Lucky the moon is so big and it’s such a clear night—we’ll be able to see where we’re going.’

I got out of the car, and my hair was instantly whipped into a vertical frenzy, as if someone had connected me to a Van De Graaf generator. Sand scudded and eddied around the carpark, haunting the edges of the parking bays. Pools of weak but eerie amber light from three lamp-posts illuminated the sand, turning it spun gold. The lamp-posts made me think of Max and his analysis of their composition: metal, leaf-oil and something else… I’d forgotten what, but it made me smile. Something to do with clouds.