“You never talk about her much,” he says, after a brief silence in which sincerity has suddenly swamped his mood.
“No. I don’t.”
“You feel like talkin’ about her now?”
And the curious thing is that I do. To talk about Kate to this weathered Yank in a pub swirling with noise and bluster.
“How long has it been now since you broke up?”
“Over a year. More.”
“D’you think you’re over her?”
“There’s always this pilot light of grief.”
“Nice way of putting it,” Fortner says. He is doing a good job of suppressing any instinct for flippancy.
“You were together what, six or seven years?”
“From school, yes.”
“Long time. You ever see her?”
“Now and again,” I tell him, just to see what happens. “You know how it is with couples who’ve been together a long time. They can’t ever really break up. So we meet once in a while and spend these incredible nights together. But we can never seem to get it going again.”
I like the idea of Fortner’s thinking she still can’t get over me.
“How often?”
“Every five or six weeks. I still confide in her. She’s still the best friend I have.”
“Really?” Fortner looks suitably intrigued, admiring, even. “She got another boyfriend?”
“Don’t know. She’s never said anything to me.”
“So how come you broke up? What happened?”
“Same thing that happens to a lot of couples after university. Suddenly they find they have to go out and work for a living, and things aren’t as much fun anymore. Priorities change, you have more responsibilities. You have to grow up so fast, and unless you can find a way of doing that together, the cracks are bound to show.”
“And that’s what happened with you and Kate?”
“That’s what happened with me and Kate. We were living together, but for some reason that made things worse. We were trying to be our parents before our time.”
This last remark doesn’t appear to have made any sense to Fortner.
He says, “What d’you mean?”
“Playing host and hostess to our friends. Dinner parties. Going to the Prado during the Easter holidays, renting villas in Tuscany. All of a sudden we were dressing smarter, choosing furniture, buying cookbooks. And we were barely twenty-one, twenty-two. We took everything so seriously.”
“That’s not like you,” he says, arching his eyebrows and grinning.
“Funny,” I reply.
“And Kate was getting a lot of work? She was finding success as an actress?”
“Partly. I was fucked up after college. I didn’t want to commit myself to any one thing in case something better came along. I was afraid of hard work, afraid that my youth was prematurely over. And I was jealous of her success, yes. It was pretty pathetic.”
“And she didn’t help?”
“No, Christ, she was wonderful. She was sympathetic and understanding, but I pushed her away. She got tired of me. Simple as that.”
“You think she was in love with you?”
I feel as though everyone sitting around us in the pub is listening in to our conversation, waiting for my response to this question. I falter, looking down at the worn brown carpet, then say, “I’ll tell you a story.”
“Okay,” he says. “But first let me buy us a drink.”
When Fortner returns he is clutching two whiskeys, mine a scotch and dry, his a double on the rocks. The bell sounds for last orders.
“Lucky I got there on time,” he says. “Now, you were gonna tell me somethin’.”
“You asked if Kate was ever in love with me.”
“Yes, I did.”
“This is what I know. During one of the summer breaks from college I went on holiday with Mum to Costa Rica. Without Kate.”
“How come?”
“I didn’t invite her.”
“Why?”
“Because I saw it as a good opportunity to have some time away from her. We lived in each other’s pockets and round about then Kate was very unsettled. And Mum wanted it to be just the two of us. She never really got on with Kate.”
Fortner just nods, takes a sip of his drink.
“My mother and I had rooms quite far apart in the hotel, so that if I came back late at night I wouldn’t disturb her. One night I went clubbing with some people who were also staying in the hotel. We drank a lot, danced, the usual stuff. There was a girl with us that I liked a lot. A Canadian. Don’t remember her name. She’d been hanging around the pool and we’d talked every now and again. She was beautiful, really sexy, and I fancied my chances, y’know? But I’d been with Kate so long that I’d forgotten how to seduce someone.”
“Sure,” says Fortner, listening hard. My glass of whiskey has a taste of aniseed on its rim. I want to take it back and complain.
“So I bought her a few drinks, tried to make her laugh, tried to act cool, tried to dance without making a fool of myself. But nothing seemed to work. All night she seemed to be getting further and further away from me and I had no idea why. Anyway, after the club closed we found ourselves in the hotel lift together, going back to our rooms, and I tried to kiss her. I lunged in and waited for a response, even though deep down I knew it wasn’t coming. I knew she didn’t like me, and sure enough she veered away. Then the doors of the lift opened onto her floor and she said good night-I couldn’t tell if she was giggling or offended-got out of the lift and went off down the corridor to her room.”
“What happened then?” says Fortner.
“I went back to my room. Shame, guilt, embarrassment, you name it.”
“You only tried kissin’ her, for Christ’s sake.”
“You don’t know Kate.”
Fortner frowns.
“It was five in the morning and I was drunk and melancholy. The time difference with London was four or five hours so I decided to ring Kate, to hear her voice, just to make myself feel better so that I could get some sleep. So I picked up the phone and dialed her number. She answered almost straightaway.”
“What’d she say?”
“She was crying.”
“Crying?”
“Yeah. I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ and without a second’s hesitation she said, ‘I just miss you. I woke up and you weren’t beside me and I was all alone and I miss you.’ That’s how much she loved me.”
Fortner absorbs the story, but his blank expression indicates that it’s nothing he hasn’t heard before. Once you’ve seen one broken heart, you’ve seen them all. He waits for a few seconds, just out of politeness, and then asks, “Was Kate always emotional? Cryin’ all the time?”
It irritates me that he’ll think of her now as meek and timid, a little lamb of insecurity unable to sustain herself without me. She wasn’t like that at all.
“No. She’s very strong. She’s one of those people who are old before their time, who know exactly what they want and don’t waste any time getting it. Kate’s very low-bullshit. She has no ego.”
“Bet you’re wrong about that,” he says, swallowing a mouthful of whiskey. “Everyone has an ego, Milius. Some are just better at hidin’ it than others.”
“You think Katharine has an ego?”
