The Flavours of Love (21 page)

‘Not really, no.’ If only he knew what else I had to worry about.

‘It’s going to be OK, Saff. You’re going to sort it all out. I know you will.’ We haven’t hugged, or even touched like this, since before that time. We’d got back on track, had been able to pretend none of it had happened, except in how we were with each other, physically. Physically, there was an unspoken but acknowledged barrier between us that neither of us would breach. Now that it has been, my body relaxes, almost falls completely into the familiarity of being held by him.

He lets me go, hanging onto my shoulders for a second longer than necessary before he takes my hand again and we start to walk. Once we fall into our pace again, our footsteps like a double-beating heart in the quiet of the night, he barely waits a second before he says, ‘Saff, I’ve fallen in love with you.’

I snatch in a sharp breath, and my step falters but he keeps walking and because our hands are linked, I have to keep moving with him.

‘I don’t want you to say anything,’ he adds quickly. ‘I know it’s onesided and I’m going to have to deal with it. I just can’t deal with it and be around you. Especially not if I have to see you and that Lewis character together.’

‘I’m not—’

‘Yes, you are. OK? Whether you want to admit it or not, you are. There’s something between the two of you and I don’t want to watch it. Not when I’m so … I didn’t even realise that’s how I felt until I
saw you with him and it was like all these feelings were suddenly unlocked. And I had no idea until now, really, that I’ve been hoping that maybe we’d, I don’t know, get together properly, settle down, maybe even have a baby – even though we’re both getting on. I don’t know … I’ve really shocked myself.’

‘Fynn—’

‘No, don’t speak. All that’s irrelevant at this moment. Look, the main reason I wanted to talk tonight was to apologise because I’ve not been a very good friend to you.’

My feet stop, I stop, refusing to move, forcing him to halt, too. ‘What are you talking about? You’ve been the best friend anyone could ask for.’

‘No, I haven’t and I’m really sorry that I can’t make up for that by sticking around.’

‘Fynn, you’re my best friend. I couldn’t have made it through the last eighteen months without you.’

‘No, a good friend – a true friend – would have confronted you by now about your eating disorder.’

I try to rip my hand away from his, but he won’t let me. He clings onto me and faces me full on for the first time since I opened the door.

‘What are you talking about?’ I ask when it’s clear he won’t let me unlink from him.

‘I don’t think it’s purely anorexia, I suspect it’s more bulimia. Or even a combination of the two, but it doesn’t matter. I haven’t been upfront with you about it. I’ve suspected for a long time. It wasn’t until you said that what happened with us was just sex that I realised what it was really about. You were trying to deal with the pain in that way, weren’t you? You used to do it with food and then you started to do it with sex. That’s why you stopped it when I was getting emotional rather than keeping it purely physical.’

I manage to tear my hand away from him, finally. Freeing myself from being joined to such nonsense. I stand back a little distance, glaring.

‘Tell me I’m wrong,’ he goads.

‘You’re wrong. You’re absolutely wrong. Look at me.’ I hold out my arms – my body is large and lumpy, misshapen and decidedly flabby even without the jumper. ‘If I had an eating disorder wouldn’t I be thin?’

‘You are thin.’

‘I am not thin. You’ve seen me naked, you know I’m not thin.’

‘
You are thin
. And you don’t eat.’

‘I do eat. I eat all the time.’

‘No, you don’t, Saff. You cook, but you never taste any of it. The times I’ve been there for dinner you give me your portion, or you say you’ll eat later. If and when you eat, it’s alone away from people. And I doubt very much you keep it down.’

‘Well excuse me if I’ve lost my appetite a little since my husband died.’

‘Look at your hands, Saff. They’re beautiful apart from the scars on the backs of your knuckles from—’

My hands. The one part of me that always lets me down. That’s why he held my hand, why he stroked across my knuckles – not out of affection but to check up on me, to see if there were remnants from what he thought I did. I tuck my hands out of sight, under the crooks of my elbows when I fold my arms across my chest. ‘Please stop this. It’s nonsense, you know it is.’

Fynn pauses, regards me for several, uneasy seconds. ‘I’m doing this all wrong. I shouldn’t have blurted it out like that. I’m sorry. I should have said I’m your friend. I love you. I don’t understand what you’re going through, but I want to help, I want to understand and be there for you. I should have said that it’s all going to be OK. That you will be all right if you get help and it’ll all work out if you’re honest with yourself, honest with someone else, if you find someone you can talk to freely. I should have said there are lots of places that you can—’

‘I’m sorry about your sister,’ I interrupt, ‘and I know what that sort of thing can do to someone and that you start to see the same
thing everywhere, in everyone that you meet, but I do not have an eating disorder.’

‘There are lots of places that you can go to for help,’ he continues as if I haven’t spoken. ‘I should have said, please get help. Go to your doctor, look online, call a helpline. Reach out to someone, Saff. No one can take that first step for you but they can help you with every other step after that. I should have said, please,
please
get some help before … Your children don’t need to lose another parent, all right?’

I can’t believe he has done this. I can’t believe he has scuttled away from the conversation the other day and come up with this. This
nonsense.

Fynn stares at me, challenges me to tell him he’s wrong again.

When I have pushed down my disbelief and shock enough to talk, I say, ‘OK, because I don’t have feelings for you, because I didn’t have to be in love to have sex with you, and doing it with you obviously wasn’t a life-changing experience for me, this is how you get me back, is it?’ As I speak, he slowly folds his arms across his body, tilts his head slightly to one side but says nothing. ‘Because I put a stop to it, and I’m obviously not rushing to do it again, and because it’s never even occurred to me to think about having another child, let alone with you,
this
is how you hurt me? This is how you put me in my place? By implying I’m a bad mother, by hinting that I’ve got some deep problem that will lead to me killing myself and abandoning my already bereaved and traumatised children?

‘I really can’t believe this. I never thought you’d stoop so low. It was just sex, Fynn. You have one-night stands and flings all the time. Why did it have to be different with me? Why did you have to make it into something it isn’t and so end up with us like this?’

Fynn has pasted a neutral look on his face, aloof, unbothered, nonchalant. But I know he is hurt, that what I’ve said has slashed at a deep part of him. Well good. Because he’s hurt me too. By saying all that to me, by accusing me of … he hurt me too and he hurt me first.

We have the words we’ve spoken to damage each other hanging like a thorn-covered veil between us and for long minutes it seems
that neither of us is brave enough to breach the gap, to try to sweep it aside.

‘It’s a good thing we’re not going to see each other any more, don’t you think?’ he eventually says with a sigh and unfolds his arms. ‘Before I go, I have to do this.’ From the pocket of his grey fleece hoodie, he produces a set of three small padlock keys on a flimsy wire ring that someone would probably spend years promising themselves to replace with a proper keyring. He tries to disguise how severely he is shaking when he reaches out, takes my hand then drops the small, shard-like pieces of metal into my upturned palm. ‘These are yours.’

‘What are they?’ I ask, even though it is obvious what they are.

‘The keys to your beach hut. I bought it. I couldn’t let you sell it – not when it meant so much to you and Joel and the kids. I kept waiting for the right time to give it back to you, but then it was Christmas, it was the funeral, it was his birthday, it was a year since he died. There was never the right time because it would have added to the pain, brought it all back when you all seemed to be getting yourselves to a better place. But, since I’m not going to be around any more, it’s time. Here’s your beach hut back. You’ll have to register it with the Seafront Office and with the council, but I’ve already told them you’re the new owner so it’s yours again.’

‘Fynn—’

‘Don’t say anything, Saff. There really is nothing left to say. I’m going to go. I’m … I’m simply going to go.’

‘Please don’t go like this. Please.’ I breathe deeply, to stop the tears, to control the erratic cadence of my heart. ‘Please.’ The air will not fill my lungs, it will not soothe the mercurial stampede in my chest. ‘I’m sorry … I’m … sorry …’ I’m hyperventilating. I need to calm down but I can’t. If I stop long enough to compose myself, he’ll walk away. ‘We … we can’t leave it like this—’

‘Take care of yourself,’ he says, talking over me.

In desperation, I touch him, on his shoulder, to hold him here, keep him in sight until we can talk. He shrugs me off as if my touch has burned him.

‘Take care,’ he gasps with tears in his voice.

He puts his head down and starts off up the road. This is why he wanted to take a stroll in the middle of the night, so he could leave, walk away, without doors or walls to hinder him.

‘Fynn, please,’ I call after him in the fragments between ragged breaths. ‘I’m sorry … Please. I’m sorry … Please. Please. Please.
Please
.’

I silently begged all the way to the hospital
that day.
I begged as I stood in the cold mortuary with a sheet covering the face of a body in front of me. I begged as I went home and with my fingers around the hands of both my children I said to them the words I never even imagined I’d have to find. I begged as the words sank into their minds and they both began to disintegrate even though I was trying to gather them up, draw them to me and keep them safe.

I’ve begged every day for eighteen months.

This is what I always beg:
Please, please, please don’t let this be happening. Please, please, please don’t let this be real
.

‘Ffrony, I’m going to have to quit Sea Your Plate.’

‘What, why?’ I asked him. I sat up on my knees in bed, watched my husband walk frantically around our bedroom, his body tense, his eyes wild with worry. He sat on the bed, leapt up too agitated to rest, marched over to the brown leather love seat in the bay window, perched on the edge, then jumped up again. He came to the bed, and started the process all over again.

Usually, after a cooking lesson, he fizzed with excitement, would bounce on the bed and take me through the class minute by (sometimes tedious) minute, as he explained the techniques he’d learnt, the flavour combinations he’d experimented with, the people he talked to. Aside from that, he was rarely like this – he was usually rational and clear-minded in how he dealt with problems. I could count in single figures the amount of times he’d been this unnerved.

‘It’s really humiliating,’ he eventually said. He stopped moving and faced me seconds before his embarrassment visibly shuddered through him. ‘There’s this woman. Audra, remember I mentioned her? The one who asked me if I’d work on a cookbook with her?’

I nodded. He’d mentioned her, and it’d sounded from the way he mentioned her that she fancied him. He couldn’t see it, of course. He was way too nice. Blinkered. There was no way I’d ask someone I barely knew, who was potentially a rival, to work on a cookbook idea I’d had if I wasn’t after him. It was a book of quick and easy meals that hadn’t sounded amazing or unique, but Joel had been enthusiastic for her and I’d said nothing about her clearly being after him.

‘Yes.’ I sat back in bed and waited to hear the inevitable.

He experienced another moment of mortification quivering through his body, then stalked back and forth across the room again. ‘Tonight, we finished class a little early so she suggested we go for a drink to talk about her cookbook, discuss where she’s got up to and what I think of what she’s done so far. And …’ He stopped, tensed himself as humiliation trilled through him again. ‘She tried to kiss me.’

‘Oh.’ Inside, of course, I was shouting
I knew she fancied you
! while simultaneously wondering how I could find out her address to go tell her to keep her lips to herself.

‘I told her, straight out, that I wasn’t interested. That even if I wasn’t married I’d not be interested. I’ve texted the cooking teacher and told him that I can’t work with her any more. But on the way home I thought it all through and realised it’d be easier if I quit altogether. She’s going to be so embarrassed. There’ll be an atmosphere and that’s not good when there’s only ten of us.’

‘
She’s
going to be embarrassed? What about you? I can’t believe the cheek of her. Didn’t she see your wedding ring?’

‘Yeah. And it’s not like I haven’t talked about you and the kids and showed her pictures.’

He climbed onto the bed, grabbed hold of my hands. ‘I swear to you, Ffrony,’ he said, ‘I didn’t kiss her back or anything. I just got the hell out of there … after I made a total show of her and me.’

‘Why, what did you say to her?’

‘It’s a bit of a blur because I was so panicked. But I said that I wasn’t like that. I was married. I had a family. I didn’t think of her like that. I liked her but I’d never think of her
like that
whether I was married or not.’

‘Doesn’t sound too bad. It was honest at least.’

‘That wasn’t the problematic part. We were sitting in a booth and I shot out of there to put some distance between us. I stood about six foot from her in a crowded bar barking all these things. Everyone heard and they were all staring. She ran out and eventually so did I.’