Separate Lives (19 page)

On paper, Will and I should have amounted to no more than three dates, two shags and one slightly strained but fabulously polite conversation about why we couldn't see each other anymore, what with having nothing in common. But instead, something strange happened—strange for both of us—which is that at precisely the point when everybody we knew thought we'd be breaking up, we did exactly the opposite and fell in love.

I'm not sure which of us did the “falling” first, but given my predilection for getting horizontal it was probably me. Still, it was a close thing and, cheesily enough, it happened on our first—and as it turned out, last—Valentine's Day, which was spent in the kind of high-end chintzy country house hotel that had yet to embrace modernism in either design or attitude, much less gastronomy, and was, we both agreed, oddly all the better—not to mention more “romantic”—for it.

This was also the day Will gave me a present. It was an unusual present for Valentine's Day—no long-stemmed roses or petrol-station teddies for Will—and it was completely extraordinary. As I tentatively pulled the paper off a large flat rectangle—a picture, surely? But of what?—the “picture” was in fact revealed to be a very old and very beautiful Venetian glass mirror. It wasn't one of those trendy copies but the real deal, complete with foxing and scratches. After I'd unwrapped it and stood staring at it, speechless, for what was clearly too long, Will said, “Bloody hell, Susie, do you hate it? Is it the most completely wrong thing ever?”

“No. No, it is easily the most magnificently beautiful thing I've ever been given. I'm just genuinely lost for words. Jesus, Will, it must've cost a—” I stopped. How crass could I be?

“Ssshh. It didn't cost anything. I don't know if that makes it better or worse, but I've had it for a long time and it's been waiting for somebody who I knew—OK, hoped—would properly love it. Marianne used to say it was the most flattering mirror in the world. I wouldn't know about that, but—”

“You had this mirror when Marianne was alive?”

“If I told you it had been her mirror, would you take that the wrong way? Would you think I'd fobbed you off with my late wife's leftovers? Have I completely fucked up? I have, haven't I?”

I can see that, for many women, being given something precious that had once belonged to their boyfriend's dead wife would have meant that, yes, Will had fucked up. Luckily he'd waited to give it to a woman who didn't think that at all, indeed whose first thought was:
Oh my God. I don't deserve this. I haven't earned it. But I'm going to
.

I was incredibly moved. And confused. Not least because taped to the glass was an envelope containing a plain piece of card, and on the card was written:
Mirror, Mirror . . . I look at this and now I start thinking of you. W x

I turned and hugged him, buried my head in his chest and heaved a sob.

“Hey. It was meant to be a happy thing. No tears, Susie—please,” said Will.

“I am happy. I'm just overwhelmed.”

It's the only time in my life I've ever cried when I've been given a present, whatever that means. And yet one day can accommodate many moods and so while I'd like to pretend
that this February 14th continued in an appropriately Mills & Boon-ish vein, it didn't.

At this time, Will was stationed in Norfolk, while his son, Luke, whom I'd never met, had already been boarding for a term and a half. In fact it was Luke's schooling arrangements that prompted our first ever row, if you could call it a row, over dinner that night. Will didn't really do rows; he just sort of clenched his teeth and glowered slightly, which in some ways was worse—and he was particularly clenched when, tongue loosened by champagne, I shared unsolicited parenting “advice” and started berating Will for sending “a tiny little boy off to boarding school, like it's nineteen-sodding-ten!”

Will suffered this rant for a bit longer than he needed to, frankly, before he said: “Susie, not only have you never had the benefit of meeting Luke to judge precisely what kind of ‘tiny little boy' he is—which is to say, not very tiny and also exceptionally mature and levelheaded for his age—but perhaps you don't entirely grasp the complexities of single parenting in the armed forces, where one could at any time be sent off thither and yon, which in turn would be infinitely more disruptive for a ‘tiny little boy' than the warm and friendly environment of weekly boarding at a school where the majority of the pupils are from precisely the same background. And then Luke spends most weekends when I'm not around either with his maternal or paternal grandparents, who not only happen to live a mere fifteen miles away from each other but have also been close friends since before I was born, so . . .”

So that told me. And the fact that at no point in his measured “argument” had Will said “you're not a parent” was not lost on me, either. Will was never condescending
or patronizing, even if I deserved it. Instead he was kind and patient and loyal, which would make him sound like a golden retriever if he wasn't also in possession of a wit so dry it could have been shaken and accessorized by a twist of lemon. And did I already mention that he was—is—also six foot two with buns of steel and was—is almost certainly still—the most incredible, imaginative, unselfish lover? No, I didn't think so.

After our Valentine's supper, during which I had behaved like a graceless idiot, Will took me back to our room and showed me a thing or two about how a man can love a woman even if a woman doesn't necessarily deserve it. And after that, when we were lying in the ridiculous four-poster that was so high and vast it had steps, Will called room service and ordered more champagne and then did such magnificently erotic things with it that I felt as though it was me, not Bells, who was the Jilly Cooper heroine. After all that, I lay in his arms and said: “I love you, Will. When can I meet Luke?”

And Will said: “Would you mind very much if we separated those two sentences and dealt with them individually?”

And I said: “No, of course not. Which one do you want to start with?”

But Will didn't answer. At least not verbally. Instead he peeled away the mille-feuille of blankets and eiderdowns under which we lay and started to lick gently between my legs, sliding his tongue slowly up and across my stomach and onward, upward toward my . . .

“Susie, you have the most beautiful breasts in the world. Now turn over. I'm going to fuck you hard.”

And because he was an officer and a gentleman, obviously I did as I was told.

So what went wrong? Well, nothing went wrong. With Will, nothing ever really went wrong in the usual way of things going wrong in relationships, but something definitely went . . . and it was, inevitably, Will. He left me for his job. Or rather, his job took him away from me, abroad three months later, and seven months after that, after I had moved out of the Crouch End flatshare and into my own bijou rental in Cricklewood, Will was still away doing excellent manly things with planes in horrible desolate places, and though we spoke as often as possible I missed him like a crazy woman and I longed for his kisses to the point where the mere thought of them had me shivering with Proustian pangs . . . and then suddenly it was December and I was standing at a bar in a Soho members' club, wearing Vivienne Westwood and feeling fine, if a bit too single for comfort, and while waiting for a cab that never came I was chatted up by a good-looking bloke called Alex.

No, I don't know what the odds are either. Somewhere there will be a set of statistics about the likelihood of people coincidentally hooking up with their partner's sibling whom they'd never previously met but only heard of, though I've yet to stumble across that website. By the time Alex got around to the family conversations, which was basically the day after the night before when we found ourselves in a Pitcher & Piano attempting to blot out our terrible hangovers with protein and carb overdoses, and when I asked his surname, not only did he shock me with:

“Fox. But I remember yours.”

And then swiftly—too swiftly for any degree of comfort—revealed that he had a twin brother, an older sister and an older brother called Will who was in the RAF and currently “away on a tour, making the world a better place, if
only in his dreams.” And I was so stunned by the revelation that I just kept
schtum
. To do anything else would, at that point have been plain daft—I was probably still technically drunk—so I just nodded and smiled and said: “Oh, really, that's so interesting. What's it like having a twin? I've often wondered.”

And as Alex trotted out all the biographical details about his family that I already knew, albeit from an intriguing new perspective and with his own spin, I just kept nodding and smiling, smiling and nodding, until: “Are you OK? Am I being incredibly boring? Tell me to shut up if you want. Or, better still, tell me about you.”

Which, under the circumstances, seemed like a good idea, so I did.

When Will returned from his tour three weeks later, there was a “crisis meeting.” Even now, many years on and having acquired at least the veneer of maturity en route, the mere thought of it makes me blush. Some parts I have even managed to block out completely, though broadly speaking it was conducted at lunchtime in a Café Rouge in a postcode that may have been New Jersey for all I knew of it. Never mind the MoD, MI5 would have been impressed by my “undercover” operation—and certainly the buttoned-up Burberry mac I'd chosen for the assignation. I stopped short of glasses and a trilby, though.

Anyway, our conversation was brief:

And after this it really is all a bit of a blur, but Will didn't say much. And then after he hadn't said much he got up and paid the bill and he left. And it was all over in about ninety seconds, albeit ninety seconds that felt like a couple of incredibly crap lifetimes lived back-to-back.

And when he'd gone, I sat there staring at my cappuccino, fighting the inevitable tears. And then about five minutes later I received a text from Will, which said:
You deserve each other. Have a lovely life. Wx

And that was particularly awful because far from being a bitter and twisted message suffused with rage and hurt, because I knew Will—knew how kind he was—I suspected he really meant it, and not in a horrible way. Not that I could ask him, of course. Not now. And that made it worse even as it somehow made it easier, too. Made it much easier to walk
out of that City branch of Café Rouge and into the cold thin light of an early January London day and get on the tube back home to my bijou flatlet in Cricklewood and pack a bag of clothes and walk the half-mile or so to Alex's basement pied-à-terre in Kilburn and sit on the wall outside and wait for him to come home, which he did at 6:37. And when he saw me, he looked surprised, of course, but also—and this was obvious—pretty delighted. And he said:

“Susie. What the hell are you doing? It's freezing! Why didn't you call? Come in, come in . . .”

And I did. And the next time I went back to Cricklewood it was to pack my stuff—including the mirror, which, judging by the face that stared back at me, no longer seemed to want to flatter—and bring it all back to Kilburn.

Despite being introduced to the rest of the Fox family the following weekend at Careless, it was well over a year before I saw Will again. From Alex—who still had no idea about any of this, and I vowed he never would—I heard that his brother Will had been re-posted twice and was apparently seeing a forty-something divorcee called Lynda. (Lynda with a “y”: I could just picture her.) And when we did finally meet, sufficient time had elapsed for me not to want to actually die of the horror of it all. Alex and I were very much a couple, it was Sunday lunch at Careless and Will (plus Lynda, who looked almost exactly as I'd imagined she'd look, which is to say not a bit like me) and was also very nice (and not a bit like me) and Luke (who was ten, and not remotely little but just as handsome as his dad) were the last to arrive and the first to leave and as we were effectively being “introduced,” we barely spoke, and then only very politely and distantly.

And it was almost entirely bearable, really—right up until the very last minute anyway, when, just as they were
about to leave and were saying their goodbyes, Will leaned in to kiss me on both cheeks and said, in a normal, cheery I've-only-just-met-you sort of voice: “Lovely to have met you, Susie. Good luck with Alex—you'll need it!” and then swiftly whispered: “You look beautiful. And very happy. I'm glad. I'm happy too.”