As she fetched the bottle of Laphroaig and poured the golden liquid into two glasses, I kept glancing across at her and noticing that she really was in good shape, for a woman of fifty. She and Caroline made me feel ashamed of myself. When I got home, I would have to start going to the gym. And improving my diet. At the moment I seemed to live off nothing but crisps, biscuits, chocolate and, of course, panini. No wonder I had no muscle tone and a spare tyre. I was a disgrace.
‘Cheers,’ she said, coming towards me with the drinks. We clinked glasses, and drank, and then there was a long moment of expectancy, both of us standing there, in the middle of the kitchen, waiting for something to happen. It was my first opportunity to make a decisive move. I missed it.
Sensing this, Alison turned away, with an air of mild disappointment, and noticed that the wall-mounted telephone was blinking at her.
‘One message,’ she said. ‘I wonder if that’s Philip.’
Of course it would be Philip! It would be Philip calling from the airport, to say that his flight had landed fifteen minutes ago, he was just waiting for his luggage to come round on the carousel, and he would be home within the half hour. Phoning to say that he had missed her like crazy and was counting the minutes.
She pressed the button and we both listened to the message.
‘
After that, the message ran on for a few seconds. Philip wasn’t speaking any more, though. In fact, it was hard to know why he hadn’t hung up more promptly, unless he was particularly anxious that there should be no chance of his wife failing to notice the ambient noise of the airport in the background, and the sing-song voice of the announcer over the PA system, saying:
18
And so the only remaining obstacle had been removed at last.
There was a beautiful logic, I suppose, to what happened next, as if we had both always known that it would happen one day; as if it were predetermined. Even so, I’m surprised to find that I can’t remember it in any detail. You always expect the defining, most precious experiences in your life to be stamped indelibly on the memory; and yet for some reason, these often seem to be the first ones to fade and blur. So I’m afraid that I couldn’t tell you much about the next few hours, even if I wanted to. I forget, for instance, the look that Alison gave me just before putting down her glass and kissing me on the mouth for the first time. (Yes, it was left to her to make that move, in the end.) I forget precisely how it felt when she took me by the hand and led me towards the staircase. I forget the sway of her back and the curve of her body as I followed her up the stairs. I forget how the initial coldness of the unused bedroom turned to warmth as she took me in her arms and clasped me against her. I forget how it felt, after so many long, long years, to have another human body in blissful, loving contact with mine: clothes intervening at first, but soon discarded. I forget, now, the texture of her skin, the faint, familiar smell – the smell of homecoming – when my lips touched the back of her neck, the softness of her breasts as I cupped and then kissed them tenderly. I forget the hours that followed, the slow, inevitable rhythms of our lovemaking, how we ebbed and flowed between love and sleep, love and sleep. How we finally woke up in each other’s arms, incredulous to find ourselves together, finally – together and inseparable – in the blue light of a wintry Edinburgh dawn. I forget it all. I forget it all.
As for what followed …
But listen – you know the end of this story, now. Or at least, now that it’s finished, now that Alison and I are together, and happy, now that the whole nightmare of what came before is over and done with, then the story has served its purpose. No need to carry on spilling words on to paper. If we all lived in a state of perfect happiness – no conflicts, no tensions, no neuroses, anxieties, unresolved issues, monstrous personal or political injustices, none of that rubbish – then all the people who run to stories for consolation all the time – they wouldn’t need to do that any more, would they? They wouldn’t need art at all. Which is why I don’t need it, and neither do you, from this point on: you don’t need to read about the plans Alison and I made that morning, you don’t need to hear any of the boring practical details about her separation and divorce, or how we moved into a house in Morningside together a few months later, or how long it took me to get used to having two teenage stepsons, how wary and mistrustful they were of me at first until we took them on our first holiday as a family, to Corsica, and somehow there it all got resolved, the resentment and bad feeling seemed to evaporate under the Mediterranean sun, and …
Well. As I say, you don’t need to know any of that. None of it is true, in any case.
19
No, none of it is true, but do you know what, I think I’m finally beginning to get the hang of this writing business. In fact I might even follow in Caroline’s footsteps, and make another attempt to get that Watford writers’ group started up. I reckon some bits of that last chapter were every bit as good as her effort about our holiday in Ireland. Did you like the way that when I was describing the sexy bits, I started every sentence with ‘I forget’? That’s good writing, that is. It took me quite a while to come up with that idea.
And I did enjoy it, I must say. I never knew that making things up could be so satisfying. I did enjoy my little fantasy about Alison, and our night of passion, and our subsequent life together. For a while there it almost felt that I was back in her house, back in her bedroom, that it was really happening, instead of the awful, miserable, fucking predictable truth, which was this:
That I stood there like a block of marble while she did her best to come on to me.
That she eventually gave up, and went upstairs, with the words, ‘I’ve got a feeling I’m wasting my time here, but just in case, Max, I’m going to leave my bedroom door open.’
That I finished my glass of whisky and about ten minutes later went into the hallway where I’d left my suitcase.
That I realized I didn’t know which bedroom I was supposed to be sleeping in, so I went into the sitting room and sat down on the L-shaped sofa and stayed there for a long while with my head in my hands.
That I finally decided I might as well crash out on the sofa and flipped open my suitcase to look for my sponge bag but found myself taking out my father’s blue ring binder instead.
