“Well. That’s very nice of you. And I’m sorry I got a bit hot under the collar about the lack of progress. That year… I can’t explain it. Everything seemed magical to me, and I thought it might to everyone else, and they’d all come flooding out of their houses with, with…”
“That’s been part of my problem, you see, Terry. I’m not sure what they’d be donating either.”
“Well, I never threw anything away. I kept every newspaper, every cinema ticket, every bloody bus ticket, just about. I’ve got one of those old-fashioned blue-and-red posters advertising the Rolling Stones, plus Bill Wyman’s autograph, because he was the only bugger who’d give me one. I’ve got photos of my mam standing outside Grant’s department store the day before they knocked it down, I’ve got a boxful of bloody shark photos, I’ve got pictures of me and my mates down at the old Queen’s Head, before they turned it into that cheesy nightclub…”
“I wonder if you might think of lending us some of that?”
She was as polite and as understated as she could be, in the circumstances. If she killed him, though, she was pretty sure a jury would understand, provided they’d been briefed on the recent history of small museum funding, and the restrictions that placed on any kind of imaginative exhibiting.
“Nobody wants to look at my old rubbish. I certainly don’t. I want to look at somebody else’s.”
“But would you mind if I looked at it?”
“For ideas, you mean? Get a better picture?”
“Well, that too, yes.”
“Oh, if you must.”
“Thank you. And I wouldn’t rule out lending us some of your memorabilia.”
“You’d have to be pretty desperate.”
“Yes,” she said. “Well.” And left it at that.
He was right, of course: she had never taken Gooleness seriously, and neither had Duncan. That, after all, was one of the strongest and richest connections between them: their contempt for the town they lived in, and the people they lived with. That was why they’d been matched up in the first place, and that was why they’d stayed together, huddled against the cold winds of ignorance and Philistinism. So what sort of curator did that make her, if she’d never been persuaded that there was a past or a present worth curating? All she and Duncan had ever been able to see was a lack of culture, and you couldn’t put a lack of culture in a museum.
Yes, she could leave, and most of her wanted to leave. Nothing was keeping her in Gooleness, just as Terry had said, apart from some nagging and probably deluded conviction that she was nicer than the sort of person who wouldn’t want to stay.
Duncan knew that she got home at six, so he turned up at about three minutes past. Annie had made sure she was back by a quarter to, though, so that she’d have time to do things that turned out not to need doing. It didn’t take her as long to hang up her coat as she’d anticipated, and the photo on the fridge didn’t actually need moving three inches to the left, then three inches to the right, and then back to where it had been all the time.
And he didn’t look at it anyway. He didn’t really look at anything.
“I suppose you knew straightaway that I was making a terrible mistake,” he said, when she asked him if he wanted a cookie. He was hunched over his tea and staring at the handle on his “bLIAR” mug. (She’d thought about giving him one of the others, in case drinking out of this one made him weepy, but he hadn’t noticed it.) “The truth is, I’d have been making a terrible mistake even if I’d been single for all those years. Even if I’d been desperate for, for…”
Annie stared at her own mug. She had no intention of asking him questions about Gina.
“You see, the thing is, I think she might be mad.”
“You shouldn’t be so hard on yourself.”
“I know that’s supposed to be a joke. But to tell you the truth, that’s one of the reasons I’ve come to that conclusion. She acts as though it’s some kind of miracle that we’ve found each other. That she got a job at the college, and there I was, waiting for her. Well, I know I’m nothing much.”
Annie felt the same little pang she’d noticed on the phone the other night, but she was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t just a straightforwardly human pity. She was relieved he’d gone, and he was worried that another woman’s interest in him was evidence of her insanity. How could she not feel protective?
“It’s all very difficult, isn’t it,” he said. “This whole business of, of whatever you want to call it.”
“I’m not sure what it is. What would you call it?”
“Knowing somebody.”
“Ah.”
“Well, I knew you. Know you. That seems to me important. More important than I’d realized. The other night, when I called you… I mean, I know it was about Tucker, and I said silly things about how Tucker was sort of our child even though not having a child was a delicate topic. But the impulse… You see, I don’t really want to tell her anything. Any news I have doesn’t belong to her.”
“Give it time.”
“I’m just not cut out for this sort of change, Annie. I want to live here. With you. And tell you things.”
“You can always tell me things.”
Annie’s heart sank. She couldn’t think of a single thing Duncan was ever likely to tell her that she’d actually want to know.
“That’s not what I mean.”
“Duncan, we’ve been more friends than lovers for quite a long time. Maybe we should think about making that relationship official.”
His face lit up, and for a moment Annie thought she was safely on to the other bank. “Marriage, you mean? Because I’d be happy to…”
“No, no. You’re not listening. The opposite of marriage. A non-matrimonial, nonsexual, once-a-week-in-the- pub friendship.”
“Oh.”
Annie was beginning to resent the unfairness of all this. The one good thing about being rejected by Duncan was that she didn’t have to end the relationship herself. Now, suddenly, it would appear that she had to both get dumped
“The truth is,” she said, acutely conscious that the phrase was being used to introduce an absurd lie, “I’ve sort of kind of started seeing somebody. I mean, it’s very,
If the somebody in question was who she thought it was—and there were no other candidates that came to mind—then “actually met” were the two words missing from the end of that sentence. But Tucker wouldn’t mind, she felt. He knew how fiction worked, and what it was for.
“You’re seeing somebody? I’m… Well, I’m aghast.”
If ever Duncan wanted to know the reason why people sometimes found him insufferable, she could point him toward that description of his inner turmoil. Who used the word “aghast” without irony?
“I was pretty aghast myself when you told me about Gina.”
“Yes, but…”
He was clearly hoping he wouldn’t have to expand on the differences between his situation and her own— which were, of course, more profound than he knew. (What if they weren’t? What if Gina were as imaginary as Tucker? This was a more plausible explanation, surely, than the one she had been expected to swallow: that a woman would take one look at Duncan and usher him straight into her bed. Actually, it wasn’t Duncan’s appearance that was the problem. It was harder to believe that a woman would spend an evening talking to Duncan and still want to sleep with him.)
“But what?”
“Well. Gina was a, was a
“Gina’s quite new. To me, anyway. And anyway, what is she? Some kind of nuclear strike that’s supposed to disable the opposition? I’m not allowed a life because you got one first?”
Duncan looked pained.
