The Last Time I Saw You (7 page)
“William, if you’re here at all this week I’m around. Just tell me when and where.”
“Gosh, that’s wonderful news. Madeline and I are staying at the Berkeley.” He pauses. “I hope this suggestion won’t fill you with horror, but I wonder if you might like to have dinner in our suite? Monday perhaps?”
I freeze for a second as the reality of his proposition hits home; his suite, his daughter, none of the distracting hubbub of a restaurant to carry us through.
“Of course. What time?”
“Eight p.m.? That should give me time to get her safely tucked in.”
I bet nothing feels safe to that little girl.
“I’ll see you then.”
I hang up and stare out of the cab window into the encroaching darkness. It stretches out forever.
I arrive outside the Berkeley just before the appointed hour, and take a couple of minutes standing outside its impressive façade, steeling myself for what’s to come. It’s right in the heart of Knightsbridge, a stone’s throw from Harrods, a tall, imposing building that I’ve only ever walked past—there’s never been a reason to go in before. I enter the hushed warmth of the lobby, which is all soft lighting and liveried doormen. I can hear the siren call of cocktail glasses chinking in the bar, the steady hum of conversation underneath; how many bars did I prop up with you, Sally? How many nights did we set the world to rights, ordering round after round as if we could somehow stretch out time and stay floating in our haze of sentiment and certainty? The slightest tremor brings her back to me right now, the smallest tweak on the chords of my memories, but tonight is not about my feelings. I take the padded elevator up to the sixth floor, trying to calm my nerves, trying to remember the fleeting ease that I felt last night on the phone.
It’s Madeline who answers the door to me, slowly swinging it open. She’s clad in a long, white Victorian-style nightdress, almost ghostly.
“Hello” she says, turning her unwavering gaze upward to meet mine.
“Hi, Madeline!” I say, hating the patronizing, syrupy undertow in my voice—it’s not that I don’t like children, it’s that I don’t quite know how to pitch it. “I’m Olivia. It’s lovely to meet you.”
William appears beside her, plucked from somewhere deep in the recesses of the cavernous suite. He’s wearing a striped shirt, the sleeves rolled up in some kind of halfhearted nod to casualness, tucked into a pair of rigidly belted dark pants. His smile of welcome momentarily illuminates his pale face, but the light drops out of his hooded eyes as fast as it appears.
“Come in, come in. I’m afraid bedtime’s still something of a work in progress.”
“Please don’t apologize,” I say hurriedly. “It’s nice to meet Madeline properly.” I look down at her, trying to identify what parts of her are Sally—that dark, chestnut hair a smudge against her white nightie, her pert little nose—but William’s receding hair is also dark, and surely most children have snub noses: am I imposing a resemblance that’s not really there?
“Do you like being called that or do you go by Maddy? Lots of people call me Livvy.”
“My name is Madeline,” she says.
“And it’s a gorgeous name too,” I say, feeling a true whisper of Sally, of that sense of wrongness I so often experienced. It’s not that I’m egotistical enough to think a grieving child is trying to psych me out, but there’s something about
that certainty, that innate self-possession, that conjures up Sally more than a mere arrangement of features ever could. “I brought you a present,” I say.
I did an emergency lunchtime dash to Hamleys for it, panic exacerbated by the fact that nonworking lunches invariably elicit a raise of Mary’s perfectly threaded eyebrows. I settled on a plush brown teddy bear—something soft and yielding that she can cuddle—which is wrapped up in my handbag.
“How kind, you really shouldn’t have,” says William. “Besides, before we get to that, we need to take your coat and organize you a drink. Would a gin and tonic hit the spot?”
“Sure,” I say—I don’t know why, Sally long ago turned me from gin to vodka—and then let him help me out of my coat. I can’t remember the last time anyone but a waiter did that for me. “I’ll just pop this next door,” he says, leaving the room, but as he does so the phone that never seems to leave his hand starts to ring.
Now it’s just Madeline and me, marooned in the vast living room. It’s desperately plush—littered with plump cushions and elegant table lights—but it still has that impersonal feeling of a big hotel. Madeline eyeballs me from her vantage point on the sofa, her small feet dangling above the thick cream carpet, waiting for me, the so-called grown-up, to make the next move. Is the set of her face—that jutting chin, those burning eyes—fury that I haven’t acknowledged the terrible thing that’s happened, or is it an electric fence designed to stop me intruding into their makeshift version of peace?
“I . . .” I want to say Sally’s name out loud, her absence and her presence both so tangible, but at the last minute
I bottle it. “Let me find your present,” I say, pulling out the parcel, and thrusting it in her direction.
“Thank you,” she says, slipping her fingers under the paper and painstakingly peeling back the Scotch tape. “Oh, it’s a teddy.” A polite upward inflection is injected into her tone.
“Do you . . . do you like teddies?”
“I used to, when I was five. Now I prefer dinosaurs.”
“Dinosaurs?”
“Yes, I want to be a paleontologist when I grow up. The dinosaurs lived thousands of years ago. They were very, very big. Now they’re extinct, which means that all of them are dead.”
Her words hang in the air, a challenge: I search desperately for the perfect, sympathetic return serve, but nothing seems remotely adequate. I’m incredibly relieved to see William coming back through, but his expression immediately makes the relief evaporate. He’s even paler than before, his face tense.
“What a fine bear,” he says, picking the teddy up and smiling fixedly. “Has he got a name?” I feel for him, I really do, and yet the falsity of it makes everything feel even more wrong.
“No, not yet,” says Madeline, barely giving it a backward glance.
“Madeline was telling me how much she likes dinosaurs,” I interject, desperate to avoid any kind of standoff about her lack of enthusiasm: I sense that William treats manners with an almost religious reverence. “Have you been to the Natural History Museum?”
“No,” she says.
“It’s near here and it’s packed with dinosaurs.”
“But they’re all dead, I told you that.”
“I know that, I meant models of dinosaurs.” Madeline looks dubious, but I blunder on. “Maybe Daddy can take you before you . . . before you go home.” I feel a lurch in my stomach as I say “home,” starkly aware of the difference between bricks and mortar and a true home: maybe this impersonal space feels more true to their state of being than the prospect of returning to what was “home” with the heart ripped clean out of it. Madeline doesn’t even dignify my comment with a response.
“Daddy, it’s past my bedtime, please will you tuck me in?”
“I most certainly will!” says William, giving me an apologetic smile. “Back shortly.”
“Really, take your time,” I say, sinking, relieved, into a squashy beige sofa.
William’s still gone ten minutes later, which gives me ample time to get over my antipathy to the gin. There’s no question he’s poured me a double, and I can’t help but feel a certain relief at the warm muzziness that starts to fizz and bubble its way through my consciousness. Is this how alcoholism starts—the seductive softening of life’s sharper edges, the picture pleasantly skewed? I don’t think life’s ever been tough enough for me to realize how easy it might be.
My eyes catch on a silver-framed photograph displayed on the mantelpiece above the fireplace and I cross to it, a little unsteady from the heady cocktail of anxiety and alcohol. Madeline stands in front of a well-appointed New York brownstone, in the kind of gray flannel school uniform that screams exclusive prep school, with Sally standing behind her, hands on her narrow shoulders, smiling into the
camera. It’s recent: I can see that just by looking at Madeline, but also from the almost imperceptible network of fine lines that thread their way around those familiar deep blue eyes. I stare at myself in the mirror above the mantelpiece, comparing battle scars; how strange it is to think that the way we remembered each other was so out of date, that we changed in parallel, but apart. And now she’ll be frozen in time as her thirty-five-year-old self, spared the indignity of gray hair, of arm flab, of all the things that I know that Sally would have hated and fought even more fiercely than the rest of us—but in escaping them she’s paid a price that even she would have balked at.
“Can I top you off?” says William, appearing suddenly behind me in the mirror, our eyes meeting in the reflection.
“Oh! I’m sorry, I . . .”
“First day of term, hence the shiny shoes and pristine lunch box.”
God, does he ever loosen up? My eyes unconsciously flick back to Sally’s photo: how did she find that kind of equilibrium with him that any successful marriage needs—that silent, subconscious agreement about how to seamlessly turn two into one? I hand him my glass.
“Just a dribble, I’m a bit of a lightweight.”
“They’ll be bringing supper up in fifteen minutes or so. I ordered the lamb, I hope that meets with your approval.”
“I’m sure it’ll be delicious.”
We move to the sofa, and I perch, awkwardly, my fingers wrapped around the slippery coolness of the glass.
“Did you come from work?” asks William. He’s smiling as he says it, but I can see a nerve throbbing on the left side of his forehead, a pale worm of stress that refuses to be held in check.
“No, I went home first. I live with James, I don’t think you met him. He was with me.”
“So sorry, I should have asked if you wanted to bring your partner. Are you married?”
“Oh no, we’re . . . we’re just roommates. He knew Sally too.” Color creeps into my cheeks, a blinding sense of how much hangs here, unsaid: the truth, the real history of our friendship, left to languish in a dark basement like unclaimed lost luggage. I try and pull the conversation back into safer waters. “Have you found out how long you’ll be here?”
“A week, maybe two. I can’t be away from work indefinitely, and Madeline’s got to get back to school.”
He enunciates perfectly, words clipped, emotion drained out of them, like flat, gray pebbles skimming the sea. I look at him, shocked by his brutal practicality. Is it coldness or self-preservation? My eyes flick to Sally’s picture on the mantelpiece, that misplaced protectiveness rearing up inside me.
“Surely no one will expect you to be straight back into normal life?” His jaw tightens, his eyes suddenly cold. He must have detected that sharpness in my tone that I didn’t intend to allow. “What is it that you do?” I add quickly.
“I put words in other people’s mouths.” I look blank. “Sorry, too obtuse. I’m a diplomat, a speech writer. I work between New York and Washington.”
We’re interrupted by the arrival of dinner, the liveried room service man making a great show of setting the dining table with a proper cloth and laying out the heavy silver cutlery. “Thank you very much indeed,” says William, palming him a ten-pound tip and pulling out one of the ornate dining chairs for me to sit on. “Shall we move on to red?”
“Yes, let’s,” I say, my chest tight and heavy with the sheer effort of holding so much in: I need to try and make some kind of real human contact, break through that rigid carapace of good breeding. This is probably the last time we’ll ever set eyes on one another and, while I don’t want to do any damage to his memory of Sally, it suddenly feels vital that we show something of ourselves. “William, I hardly know what to say—anything I think of sounds trite, or trivial . . .”
The words are benign, but I think he hears something different in my voice, almost a cry for help. He seems to uncurl a little, although he’s twisting his napkin around his hand as tight as a tourniquet, his knuckles blanched by the pressure.
“I just can’t seem to make it past disbelief,” he says. “I travel so much anyway—I keep expecting Sally and me to be reunited, like she’ll walk through the door any minute and tell me how gruesome my shirt is.” He looks away as he says it, almost like he’s hearing her. A shiver goes through me, a sense I’m walking on her grave, inveigling myself into the nucleus of her life when she’d so summarily rejected me from it. But William invited me, and maybe in one sense, so did she: why else would she have given Madeline my name? I glance back at the photo, at Sally’s smiling face: is it me, or does that wide, confident grin not quite convince?
“You must still be in shock.” He looks me full in the face, a nakedness in his expression that I haven’t seen before. It impels me forward. “I don’t mean to pry . . .” I say, searching his face to try and judge if I’ve inched my way too far, “but Lola told me that there are some questions . . .”
“There are,” he says, his tone a full stop. We sit there, subsumed by the leaden silence—I take a sip of my wine to
give myself a valid distraction. It’s extraordinary, rich and complex—it tastes of money. William unexpectedly tips his glass toward me.
“Olivia, I wanted to thank you for venturing out tonight, and for not shying away. Sally often used to talk about all the fun you had, and I appreciate that this is the utter antithesis.”
“Thank you,” I say, suddenly feeling tears flooding my eyes. His distress is so palpable, and yet so teeth-grindingly controlled. It’s like a heat haze filling the room, static and oppressive. “I’m sorry . . .” I say, “I’m really sorry.” I can’t hold the tears in any longer, the buildup of pressure too much to bear. William swiftly walks round the table, kneeling in front of me.
“Please don’t apologize,” he says, imploring, handing me my discarded napkin. “I’m the one who should be apologizing. The last thing I wanted to do was cause you more distress.” I try and get hold of myself, but the more I try to regain control, the more it runs away from me.
“I’m such an asshole,” mutters William vehemently, handing me another napkin.
“You’re not.”
“I am, I’m so bloody useless at this stuff.”
He looks stricken, like some Dickensian headmaster is issuing directives from somewhere deep in his psyche. What “stuff” does he mean? I sense there’s a story there for him too, his own left luggage.
“No, I’m glad. Truly, I’m glad to be here,” I say, tears subsiding, realizing as I say it that it is at least partly true. If there had only been the funeral and the brutal return to normal life I wouldn’t have been able to rest, I’d have worried away at all my unanswered questions like a fox
in a trap, gnawing its leg off in desperation. I give him a half smile, moved by the sight of him kneeling on the ground. He doesn’t seem nearly as unreachable now he’s crumpled on the carpet, shirt spilling out from those stiff pants.
