‘And you have Ed and Poppy, I see.’ He smiles. ‘Easy to find out all about your life from Instagram. Not that I was stalking but once you got in touch, I did have a look.’
I nod. Of course I know it’s out there but it suddenly hits me how exposed I am.
We sit for a second. Now For The Main Event, says the pause.
Ollie breaks the silence with something he has obviously practised. It masquerades as a joke, but his eyes say terror.
‘So you didn’t have a kid that’s mine then?’
There’s a beat as he realises what he’s said.
‘I mean …’
I shake my head to tell him it’s okay but my smile falters.
‘No,’ I say eventually as I compose myself. ‘I would probably have mentioned that earlier.’
He’s a good actor, if he did send the video.
‘Do you really not know?’ I say suddenly, downing the last of my wine and fighting the urge to order another one, despite the fact I have to drive home, ‘why I contacted you?’
He shakes his head. Smiles at me. He keeps doing that, a really big, genuine smile like it is nice to see me, and it is contagious and I do it back before I remember, each time, why I am here.
‘The kid was my best guess,’ he says.
‘Serious?’ I ask.
‘God knows,’ he mutters. ‘I could see they weren’t on your Facebook but maybe that was deliberate. I don’t know. It was pretty out of the blue.’
He reaches for my hand.
‘And we had managed it once before.’
His eyes fill with tears as mine do and we think of our baby girl, just for that second, together. I wonder if that means as much to him as it does to me. It’s such a relief.
We sit then again in the company of that shared experience and shared loss. There is calm from being able to think about my first baby with the only other person who understands and I tighten my other hand around his. He squeezes back, and it feels like clinging.
‘I know,’ he says. ‘I think about her.’
It takes a few minutes to regroup.
I let go of his hand and go to the bathroom again. When I come back he stares at me.
‘So. Come on then. Tell me what it is, new strait-laced Scarlett. Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.’
There it is. That singsong. We smile.
And I realise I would look strait-laced to him in fresh make-up, drinking a glass of red without the wide eyes and the bare legs.
My heart pounds. He DJ’ed sometimes, too. Staring out at me from the decks as I danced for him. What an odd thing, to go off and live life and procreate and move on, but to leave a bit of you back there, twenty-two and besotted.
He repeats my name. ‘Scarlett, Scarlett, Scarlett.’
I’m still back there, which means I can’t speak here, now.
‘What is life like now then?’ he asks. He leans forward, onto the table, looking in my eyes. ‘Is it all book clubs and organic kale? Are you …’
He does a hammy gasp.
‘Are you … respectable?’
I blush, like I’ve been caught out. Like the police have come to the door to arrest me for something I did twenty years ago. I’m a fraud, I think. Whatever facade I’ve put on, it’s not convincing.
But his teasing is warm. And it’s nice to break the sadness of earlier.
‘I am actually, yes,’ I say after a while. ‘And I like it. Like you say, respectable. People respect me.’
My eyes fill with tears.
‘Or they did.’
He raises an eyebrow.
‘Tell me if you did it, Ollie. Tell me if you shared the video.’
But when I look up, sobbing, I know he didn’t.
Because while his hair has greyed, his eyes haven’t changed.
‘Fuck, Scarlett, what happened to you?’ he says. He goes to touch my face and I see him stop himself, think, about his wife probably, and how this would look, might have looked, as he sits in a pub with his ex. But then he does it anyway.
I tell him what happened.
He slumps back in his chair and I realise for the first time that this affects him too. Sure, I’m female, and so I bear the biggest load of it, but it’s his body, his sexuality that’s up there too.
‘Rose,’ he says, looking queasy. ‘My parents. The kids, even, when they’re older. The thought of people seeing that …’
He looks at me.
‘Why would I do that?’ he says. ‘To myself as well as you.’
I flounder now, defensive almost.
‘Oh come on, Ollie, everyone knows it’s not as embarrassing for a bloke. There’s no shame for you. Maybe you wanted to get revenge. For me leaving you.’
He looks at me.
‘After all of this time?’ he says. ‘You think I’m that bitter?’
Then, quietly and sad. ‘You didn’t really think it was me?’
He says it hoping.
I say nothing.
‘You did,’ he says, devastated, and I duck my head.
If Ollie didn’t do this, then it isn’t over. And it means I have to contact Mitch.
‘Do you have a number?’ I ask, wincing.
Ollie looks up from the dregs of his coffee.
‘For Mitch. Do you have a number?’
He shakes his head.
‘Sorry, Scarlett,’ he says. He thinks. Scrolls through his phone contacts. ‘I don’t keep in touch with anyone who knows him either.’
I can’t make eye contact with him because now, more than at any other point in the conversation, we have to picture it. The night that I tried to break our grief, not understanding myself well enough to know that I was really trying to break our relationship, by bringing someone else into our private sphere. Self-destruct didn’t cover it; it was relationship destruct, life destruct.
I was sad and I had been through something no one should have to go through, not least when they are twenty-three and living in a shared flat and working in a pub and also have done their share of pain already, surely, losing their mum from breast cancer when they were barely able to remember her.
I’d pressed a
