Love Rules (44 page)

‘Maybe, if I can afford it,’ Thea said, knowing she probably could because Mark and Alice would happily help.

‘I'd buy you an olive bowl as a house-warming present!’ Alice said, tipping another two stones into Thea's hand.

‘Hold on, let me grab a saucer from the kitchen,’ Thea said.

Alice followed her. ‘Come for dinner on Saturday night!’

Thea wiped her herby, oily hands on her jeans and raised an eyebrow. ‘Oh God, you're not going to try and set me up, are you?’

‘I'm thinking of having all my hair chopped off,’ said Alice, making a glaring attempt to change the subject.

‘It's too soon, Alice,’ Thea said quietly.

‘I've been growing it for four years!’ Alice objected.

‘I'm not talking about your hair,’ said Thea.

‘I know,’ Alice replied with quiet insistence, ‘but perhaps I'm allowed to be your judge, Thea. It was ages ago – back in the spring. Now it's practically autumn.’

‘It's not even September for another two days!’ Thea objected. ‘Next you'll be telling me you've been married for five years.’

‘Well, I have, in a manner of speaking,’ Alice retorted, having a grin at her own expense. ‘It'll be three years this year, so I can indeed say the year after next I'll have been married five years.’

‘Look, please,’ Thea said, opening bread sticks and a tub of houmous, ‘I just don't feel ready. And I don't want to analyse it any more. I'm not living in the past. I'm not mourning. I'm fine, now. I just don't fancy having to decide whether I fancy someone or not just yet. I'm not in the mood.’

‘It's only Mark's cousin anyway,’ Alice said. ‘Harmless. Practically family.’

‘The American one?’ Thea asked.

‘Yes,’ said Alice, ‘one of them.’

‘Not the one at your wedding who then emailed me, by which time I was already with Saul?’

‘No, a different cousin. Mark has about sixty-seven of them.’ Alice paused. ‘Have you heard from him, from Saul?’
After weeks when Saul had been Thea's only topic of conversation, there had followed the more recent weeks when his name hadn't been mentioned.

‘No,’ said Thea evenly, ‘no.’

‘When did you take off your ring?’

‘After the last phone call. Four or five weeks ago.’

‘What have you done with it?’

‘I've put it in my odds-and-sods drawer.’

‘Odd sod indeed.’

They munched on vine leaves thoughtfully. ‘You'll be proud of me,’ Thea said. ‘I even bought the
Observer
today for the first time in ages and found I could skim through Barefaced Bloke's column with no need to read between the lines.’

‘He still freelances for
Adam
,’ Alice admitted, ‘but I don't speak to him directly and I haven't seen him. He sends me his work as simple attachments.’

‘A simple attachment was the pinnacle of my hopes and dreams,’ Thea said, a sad glaze to her eyes suddenly dulling the ease of their afternoon. ‘It's still bloody scary, Alice.’

‘I know,’ said Alice, giving Thea's leg a comforting squeeze, ‘but someone or other said we don't have dreams unless we have the power to fulfil them.’

‘Someone else said love is a grave mental illness,’ Thea rejoined, ‘Plato, I think.’

‘Yes, but while you're waiting for the right man to come along, you can have plenty of fun with the wrong ones,’ Alice said, ‘according to Cher.’

‘I'm not entirely sure that Cher and Plato equate on the philosophy stakes,’ Thea remarked, ‘and I'm not waiting for Mr Anyone, anyway.’

‘Well, Woody Allen is arguably the Plato of our age and he says that love may well be the answer but sex raises some good questions while you're waiting for the answer.’

‘Alice!’ Thea chastised. ‘Stop it with the American rent-a-quote, would you? I'm
not
looking for love and I'm
not
in need of sex and I'm not questioning anything – I'm just getting on with things.’

‘So just come eat with us Saturday, huh?’ said Alice. ‘A girl's gotta eat.’

‘Why are you talking in an American accent?’

‘I don't know.’

‘You have to promise me you're not match-making,’ Thea warned her.

‘Cross my heart, hope to die, bla bla,’ said Alice, thinking a little white lie never hurt anyone. ‘Come on, I'll help you clear the lunch stuff away. Then I'd better go and help Mark pack. Poor bloke having to fly to Hong Kong on August bank holiday. Oh well, at least he's only going for three nights this time.’

Thea awoke in the small hours with a start. She sat bolt upright in bed with her heart racing at the sense and suddenness of the idea that had woken her. She glanced at the clock. It was just gone four in the morning. She dressed. She rummaged in her odds-and-sods drawer and then she left her flat and drove to Hampstead. She sat outside Alice's house for a while, wondering how best to wake her. She wanted her P.I.C. but she needed her in good humour, not grumpy and shocked. If Thea rang the doorbell, or called her by phone, Alice might panic that something had happened to Mark who was currently en route to Hong Kong. For an hour she sat in her car, fingering the nap of the dark blue velvet box. She sent Alice a text.

r u awake? txxxxxxxx

No reply. She sent another.

r u awake for a chat? Txxxxxxxxx

No response. She sent another.

r u awake? am in my car outside your house … txxxxx

Thea saw the curtains at Alice's bedroom window ripple. Then she saw one side flung back as bed-headed Alice peered out. Thea leapt from her car and waved. The curtains closed. Thea made her way to Alice's front door.

‘Thea, it's fucking six o'clock!’ Alice bleared. ‘What's going on?’

‘It's my ring,’ Thea told her. ‘I know what to do with it and I want to do it right now. With you. Get dressed.’

‘Don't be stupid – I'm going back to bed. You go and shape your idea in the living room and I'll see you in a couple of hours. It's a bank bloody holiday – I don't have to get up at all.’

‘No, Alice – no!’ Thea said. ‘
Now
. Get dressed. It won't take long. You can have a lie-in later.’

‘Oh, bloody hell,’ Alice said, padding away stroppily to do as she was told.

Thea and Alice drive to Primrose Hill. It's deserted apart from a couple of insomniac dog-owners, or perhaps it's the dogs, taking each other for a walk.

‘I can't believe you're making me do this,’ Alice says though actually, now she's dressed and in the fresh air, she's alert and feeling quite affable.

At the top of Primrose Hill, in the dawn of August bank holiday Monday, Thea and Alice take a seat on one of the benches with a view. Alice gazes at the ghostly panorama of London. The design of the rubbish bins on Primrose Hill echo the shape of Canary Wharf. Everything seems a little unreal, distorted.

Thea opens the small, navy velvet box. She removes the ring and lays it in the palm of her hand, offering it to Alice to inspect. Alice takes it and looks it over thoroughly, reads
the Yeats inscription silently. She puts it back in Thea's out-stretched hand.

‘I didn't want to throw it away,’ Thea says quietly, seemingly to the ring itself, ‘because I don't want to rubbish what I had with Saul. I didn't want to bury it because that seems negative – vindictive, almost. But I don't want to keep it. I need to do the right thing by it. I just want to let it go – just let it all go.’

Thea stands and then, with a competent throw, launches the ring as high as she can. She turns away. She doesn't need to see where it lands, she's pleased that she's released it to a place, a time, sacred to when she and Saul were very very happy. Now she's spread their dreams under other people's feet. She hopes they'll tread softly. She faces Alice who has tears in her eyes.

‘Ready?’ Alice asks, linking arms with her.

‘Yup,’ says Thea, leading the way.

‘The thing is, I do really want to love again,’ Thea said a little later over a Starbucks latte and supposedly healthy muffin despite its monstrous proportions. ‘I'm very good at it. But I don't want to
just yet
– do you see? I have to have faith in my own time frame. I've done the mourning and the grieving and the anger and the desolation. I had that frightening but thankfully brief period of denouncing all men as bastards and condemning love as ridiculous. Now I'm back on an even keel but I don't want to force my passage through.’

‘I understand,’ Alice assured her, ‘I do, truly. I know I tease you for being soppy but actually I've always admired your tenacious pursuit of romance.’ She dunked her croissant into her cappuccino. ‘Though I have always warned you against setting fairy-tale standards for matters of love and eternity.’

‘It's weird – because I've actually taken a leaf out of your
book,’ Thea confessed. ‘I used to think that falling head over heels in love was the benchmark. But it wasn't head over heels, it was heart over head and actually, I like your idea that you should use your head so as not to lose your heart.’

‘Love and marriage, or longevity, or whatever you want to call it, do go hand in hand,’ Alice assured her, ‘but perhaps it takes a certain type of love to succeed.’

‘I'm not going out there armed with fixed criteria on what makes a Potentially Good Husband-Type!’ Thea objected.

‘I'm not saying you should,’ Alice stressed, ‘but don't hold it against a nice chap if you don't necessarily feel that elusive tingle of yours on day one.’

‘I know. I agree. But I still think a shared belief in fidelity, in the value of companionship, the notion of pairing for life, is a good starting point.’

‘Yes, but so is acknowledging practical issues,’ Alice said, ‘careers, money, long-and short-term goals. Respecting each other's lives independent of the union.’

‘I do still love the idea of being in love,’ Thea said.

‘You wouldn't be you if you didn't,’ Alice assured her warmly, ‘but be prepared now for knights in shining armour to come in many guises,’ she added knowingly. ‘Some of them aren't conventionally dashing – they don't suddenly sweep you off your feet and whisk you away on a gallant white charger. I should know. Believe me.’

‘You mean he might be wearing a suit and driving a nice Lexus,’ Thea said, ‘like Mark.’

‘I do,’ Alice agreed wholeheartedly.

‘I guess you've always thought that there are rules for love,’ Thea mused, ‘while I've simply believed that love just rules OK.’ The Starbucks in Belsize Park was starting to fill up but such is the quality of that branch's milk froth, Alice and Thea were still lingering over their first cups of coffee and had no intention of relinquishing their seats. ‘Oh Alice,
bloody hell – of all our years, hasn't this one been the maddest for both of us?’ Thea proclaimed wistfully.

Alice cast her gaze out the window and nodded. Mad was only one word for the year they'd had. She still wasn't sure it was plain madness that drove her to Paul. In retrospect she acknowledged that the affair itself was madness but perhaps what drove her was insecurity. Or her sex drive. Or her own unrealistic expectations of love and marriage due to impracticable emphasis on sex and lust.

‘How are
you
?’ Thea asked her quietly, having skim-read her thoughts. ‘Have you heard from That Paul?’

‘No, I haven't,’ Alice answered truthfully. ‘It's so weird how I went from deifying him like he was Love God Number One to being really quite irritated by him. I was so impressed by his visible masculinity, I was so swept away by the physical roller-coaster thrill, it was bizarre to discover so suddenly that I didn't really like him all that much. In fact, he got on my nerves.’ She was just about to denounce his taste in trainers and mock his inability to navigate the London Underground system when she stopped. It shocked her to remember she never told Thea about Paul's impromptu final trip, though she'd spent her lifetime telling Thea everything; the mundane to the outrageous all in the most intimate detail. Yes, Thea was going through the vortex of suffering back then, but also Alice had known all along what she was doing was wrong and she was ashamed. She hadn't wanted to talk about it. She was doomed to have it as her guilty, gut-twist secret.

‘You look a bit sad,’ Thea said, ‘a little distracted.’

‘If I had an itch after two and a half years of marriage, what'll I feel like after seven?’ Alice admitted sheepishly. ‘Say I meet another Paul-type at some point,’ she said, ‘and I'm lured into another crazy shag fest.’

‘But
you
did the luring, Alice, didn't you? If you're honest.’

‘I did,’ Alice confessed, ‘but in a perverse way, that's the point and that's what unnerves me. Though I admit it was crazy and dangerous, it was fun too. Initially. I suppose I'd tucked that side of me – the flirt, the sexy minx – out of sight while I busied myself setting up home being a married woman. It's like the two can't coexist. But actually, it's a side of me that makes me sparkle. And that's what scares me. I must keep a lid on it for the sake of my marriage, but doesn't keeping it in check also sacrifice a little part of me? I don't know if that's a good thing.’

‘I think it is a difficult thing – but I don't think it's a bad thing. Look on it as being abstemious and, by definition, as being good for the soul,’ Thea said. ‘You and Mark are such a
team
– more so now than ever I've known. If you hadn't challenged it when you did – and with thankfully no fallout – perhaps you wouldn't be as content as you are now. I'd hope that Brad Pitt himself could accost you and you'd turn him down without a glance or falter. I suppose you'll have to train yourself not to let the thought cross your mind; train yourself to find the inclination unappetizing.’

‘I feel it's really insulting to Mark to say this,’ Alice confided, ‘but I can admit to you that the thought I'll never again have that rampant, urgent, animal sex makes me feel low. Isn't it wrong to cauterize one's passions? I
love
that sense of being ravished, being someone's fantasy incarnate, being fucked within an inch of my life.’ Alice shrugged. ‘Pure sex without the encumbrance of love is the most massive turn-on.’

She stopped abruptly. Simultaneously, she and Thea fell on the silent connection with Saul. Was it something to declare out loud? Was it something they could constructively discuss? No. It wasn't the same. Alice acknowledged how Mark didn't know about her fling into adultery whereas Thea knew way too much about Saul. And then Alice thought
about how she and Mark had such a charmed life while Thea had been through hell. And the horrible knowledge that, if she'd been caught, Mark would have been as distraught as Thea. She wondered whether Thea ever wished she'd never come across Saul that ghastly day.