Where Love Lies (18 page)

‘Anyway,’ I say, ‘I’m really tired. I might get an early night. It’s supposed to get hotter tomorrow.’

‘For the next few
weeks. Proper summer weather for once. Mum’s fretting about her flowers.’

What has he told his parents and Suz? Anything besides the fiction that I’m here working? I doubt it; Molly has already sent me two cards. One had a kitten on the front, and the other had a fake 1950s housewife on it. Both of them said, in her cheerful handwriting,
Good luck with the book!

‘Well,’ I say, ‘I suppose I should
find something for supper. Lauren hasn’t left much in the cupboards except for some protein bars. I think they’re from her personal-trainer boyfriend.’

‘Do you have any plans for tomorrow?’ He asks it in a rush. ‘Shall I come up to London? We could meet for lunch.’

The ring on my finger tells me to say yes. It was Quinn’s grandmother’s – rose gold and diamonds. I twist it round and say, ‘I’m
not sure. The whole thing about having space, Quinn, is that I have space.’

‘I don’t need to come to Canary Wharf. We could meet somewhere.’

‘I don’t know. It’s … I need to think about things.’

‘I’m your husband, Felicity. You can meet me for lunch.’ For the first time since that night I left, there’s an edge of impatience to his voice.

I twist the ring on my finger. Tuesday. Ewan asked me
to meet him Tuesday. I can’t be certain of anything until then.

It would be so easy to meet Quinn for lunch, fall into our relationship, our companionship, our routine. Our pretending. It would be easy to go home with him. Go back to Tillingford with nothing having changed. Like our conversation about his bicycle, running in well-worn tracks.

‘Give me another week. We can meet up next weekend.
Okay?’

‘I suppose it will have to be.’

‘Good night, Quinn.’

‘Good night, love.’

GREENWICH IS HOT
. The sunlight bounces off the big white buildings of the Old Royal Naval College and steals the coolness from the Thames. I make my way through the park, up the path between swathes of grass towards the oniony dome at the top of the hill, the spike with the red ball impaled on it.

Ewan told me not to wait for long, which implies that he wouldn’t stick around long
himself, and I don’t want to miss him. So, for once in my life, I’m early. Even on a hot Tuesday morning, the path is thronged with tourists calling to each other in their own languages, pushing buggies, taking photos, wheezing from the climb. Some people have spread blankets on the grass and are laying out picnics.

I reach the top of the hill. The Meridian Line is in a courtyard behind big black
gates. People are queuing up behind it, waiting to stand on it and have their photograph taken with one foot in the east, one in the west. Did Ewan want to meet me actually on the line, or somewhere near it? I hesitate, but decide to stand outside the gates on the top of the hill. This way I can see him coming if he’s not here yet, and I can see him inside the courtyard if he’s beaten me here.

I station myself next to the clock set into the wall near the gates. I’m five minutes early – that’s not very early, but it’s quite a bit for me. It would be better if I had a newspaper or something to read, something to take my mind off waiting, like Quinn always has. I crane my neck, looking for Ewan, trying to peer around tourists. ‘This is it,’ says one of the tourists near my shoulder. ‘This
is where time begins.’

Is that what it is here? I must admit I have only the shakiest idea of what the Prime Meridian even means. Below the clock there are displayed Public Standards of Length, in iron bars. So that everywhere in the world, things are measured the same. This is a yard. This is a foot. This is certainty.

I spot a black leather jacket to my right, coming up the hill. My heart
leaps, but it’s a teenage boy with a pierced lip, not Ewan at all.

I think about what he said to me.
Don’t wait for long. And if I don’t turn up, forget all about me
.

It’s all very well, his saying that. But I don’t seem able to forget about him.

Last night, I Googled ‘frangipani’. Wikipedia told me that it was another name for the plumeria flower, a tropical and sub-tropical species. It has
a sweet scent but no nectar. In many places in Asia the flower is associated with funerals, cemeteries and death.

I kept looking, but there was nothing about a disease that causes you to smell frangipani.

I could ask for an earlier appointment with the neurologist and see if there’s something physical causing me to have the scent and the memories. There might be some medication I could take.
Or perhaps it’s something more serious. I’ve seen what cancer does. Perhaps I’m carrying something around in my mind aside from memories, something growing and changing, something that may eventually eat all my memories away.

Perhaps this love is a sickness.

I leave the clock and the measurements and go to the other side of the path, leaning on the railing to gaze down at the view. The white
symmetrical buildings below, the columns, the towers, the upright architecture, rational and perfect. Beyond it, across the river, are the jagged peaks of Canary Wharf, where I’ve been living since I’ve run away from my life.

And all love is sickness, isn’t it? Something that comes from outside of you, like a virus, or from inside of you, like a cancer. It changes everything about you. It’s temporary
or it’s permanent. You can’t rip it out without causing more damage.

‘Flick,’ says Ewan behind me, and I jump. He’s not wearing his leather jacket, just a T-shirt and jeans.

‘You came,’ I say, breathless.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here.’

‘I am.’

We stare at each other for a moment. He’s breathless too, as if he’s run up the hill to get here.

‘I’m sorry I’m a little late,’ he says. ‘I had to
wait around for the postman, and then there was a bit of an argument.’

‘You weren’t rude to another member of Her Majesty’s Postal Service, were you?’

‘Apparently it’s against the law to give a person a letter addressed to another person, even if the first person was the one who wrote it.’

‘You were trying to get a letter back that you’d written? Why?’

‘It’s a long story. And a boring one.
Let’s get out of here, there are too many people.’

We slip through a gap at the top of the railing. I sniff, but there’s no frangipani, just a faint scent of shower gel. He’s shaved since I saw him last, and washed his hair. He doesn’t say anything as we walk past the crowds of people snapping photos of the view.

Ten years can change a lot. Since we were lovers, Ewan has become a father. He’s
been places, lived in houses, met people, had what looks like a successful career. The visible signs of change on his face, in his clothes, are only the surface of what could be seismic changes inside. I used to know him in the past, but that doesn’t mean I know him at all any more. And even then, ten years ago, we only spent a summer together. This man is a stranger.

It’s safer to think that
way, anyway.

We reach a tree and Ewan sits down on the dry grass underneath it in the shade. I do the same and lean my back against the trunk.

‘It’s a nice afternoon,’ I say. Something you would say to a stranger. Something I might say to Quinn, these days.

Ewan looks out across the grass, down the hill to the historical buildings and all the people milling around them, like tiny insects. He
glances up at the blue sky and he rubs the palm of his hand against the scrubby grass.

Then he barks a laugh. ‘It’s a beautiful day,’ he says. He throws himself backwards onto the ground, and sweeps his arms and legs to and fro. If he were in the snow, he’d be making an angel. ‘A strange and beautiful day to be alive. Since when do
you
talk about days being “nice”?’

Ten years ago I would have
flung myself down beside him. Rolled and rolled down the hill, laughing.

‘Well,’ I say, ‘it is. Nice.’

He sits up and brushes grass out of his hair. ‘I’m sorry about Esther,’ he says. ‘I thought she would go on for ever.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Yes. So did I.’

‘You saw the painting she did of me? With those flowers?’

‘Yes. In New York.’ This isn’t how I was expecting the conversation to go. I was
expecting an argument. I didn’t even think he’d listened to what I’d said the other day about my mother.

‘Is that why you found me?’ he asks. ‘Because you saw the painting and you wanted to tell me about your mother?’

‘It was partly because I saw your painting.’

He glances sideways at me, briefly. ‘How did she die?’

‘Does it make a difference?’

‘No. I suppose not. Death is death.’

‘Except
it’s not,’ I say with more vehemence than he must have been expecting, because he looks fully at me now. ‘Some are worse than others.’

‘Was she very ill?’

‘She had cancer. She was in a lot of pain. She wanted to die.’ I rip handfuls of grass from the dry ground and drop it in clumps.

Ewan looks down. He offers no comfort, as Quinn would. He doesn’t ask me for any more details.

‘Sometimes it’s
the best thing,’ he says to the grass, or to himself, or maybe to me. ‘The world’s going to carry on existing whether you’re here to see it or not. I don’t think it makes much difference.’

‘It makes a huge amount of difference to me.’

‘Because you loved her. But if there’s no one to love you, there isn’t much difference.’ He stands up and dusts the dry grass and dirt from his trousers. ‘Right.
Well. Thanks for meeting me.’

‘That’s it? You’re going?’

He shrugs. ‘I’m not all that interested in the view. I wanted to say sorry for Esther. I’ve said it. So I’ll go now.’

I jump to my feet. ‘I don’t understand you. You begged me to come here, and now you’re just leaving. You haven’t told me why you wanted to meet me. You haven’t told me anything about yourself at all.’

‘You don’t want
to know.’

‘I do want to. That’s why I came.’

‘What do you want to know, then?’

I gesture with my hands. ‘What do you do? What have you done? It’s been ten years, Ewan.’

‘I’m a guitar player. I play session guitar for bands. We go on tour. I play guitar for them on their songs. That’s pretty much it.’

‘What about your band? With Dougie and Gavin and that other guy?’

‘That didn’t really go
anywhere. I went back to Glasgow. As you know.’

‘And you married Alana.’

‘And I married Alana.’ His voice is singsong, as if he’s mocking me.

‘And you had a child.’

‘Rebecca. Yes. Didn’t we go through all of this the other day?’

‘And …’ Any question I could ask seems somehow inadequate. I have butterflies in my stomach, anxiety in my throat. ‘How are they?’

‘I don’t know.’

His hands are
on his hips.

‘I haven’t seen them for two years,’ he says. ‘I send them a cheque every month. Alana got remarried. She has other children, a brother and sister for Rebecca. I assume that they’re happy.’

‘You don’t see them? Not at all?’

He shrugs again. ‘It didn’t work out.’

‘But you’re her father.’

‘They’ve got a new life. They’re better off without me. Is that what you wanted to know?’

I stare at him. This was what I suffered all that heartbreak for, wandering around a cemetery in Paris, crying? So he could have a child with Alana and then leave her? What kind of father says his daughter is better off without him?

‘Lauren was right,’ I say. ‘You are a bastard. I shouldn’t have met you.’ I turn to leave, and then it all changes.

The air, the hot summer air, dry and dusty, is
suddenly filled with the scent of frangipani. It weighs down the trees with sweetness, presses on the grass, brightens the sky.

I throw my arms around Ewan’s neck and kiss him on the mouth.

Oh, touching him is so wonderful. His lips are warm and full like I remember, slightly rough, chapped, his shoulders are broad, his body against mine is a perfect memory of happiness. I twine my fingers in
his hair, shorter now than it was then but the same texture. Through my pleasure and my desire and the drugging scent of frangipani I can feel that his muscles have stiffened and he’s standing completely still. His hands aren’t touching me to pull me closer or to push me away, and his mouth is slightly open, in surprise or to take an interrupted breath. Kissing him is like kissing a single moment
of time, frozen, not moving forward.

I love him. It’s a ball of heat in my chest where my heart is. I have never stopped loving him somewhere deep inside, and Ewan makes a sound in his throat and his hands grasp my hips. He holds me. His mouth moves, softens and opens, and then presses back against mine. He’s kissing me too. Like he used to kiss me, when we were hungry for each other, when we
couldn’t get enough. Secret kisses, stolen kisses, kisses under the duvet in my bedroom as the stars rushed across the sky towards daylight.

Happiness makes tears spring up under my closed eyelids. I’m lost, I’m in love, it’s the feeling everyone searches for through their entire life and I can feel it now. It doesn’t matter what’s happened since. And I’m kissing Ewan and he loves me too …

And then he releases me and steps backwards, not out of my arms but far enough so that our lips break apart. ‘What are we doing?’

‘Kissing,’ I tell him, although one wouldn’t think it was necessary to explain, and I kiss his top lip, where it bows down slightly in the middle, and his bottom lip, plump and hot, and the side of his mouth, and he makes that sort of groaning sound again and he kisses
me right in the middle of my mouth. Our tongues touch.

He takes hold of my wrists and removes my arms from around his neck, and then steps back some more so that we’re not touching at all except for his hands on my wrists. I can taste him on my tongue.

‘Why are we kissing?’ he asks me.

‘Because –’
I love you, I’m in love with you and frangipani is in the air and nothing else matters
– ‘because
you’re a very good kisser.’

‘Felicity, this is crazy. We don’t know each other.’