The Whole Day Through (8 page)

In the weeks after they rediscovered each other, Laura laid waste this idea he had of himself. With quiet ruthlessness, she brought him to see that what he thought of as the historical truth of their shared history was only a
version, a narrative he had unconsciously shaped to cause the least pain for others and least blame for himself.

He did not recognize her immediately – twenty years had passed and they were in a hospital corridor, after all, not a reunion in college, so he was not looking for old faces. He emerged from a crowded lift and she was standing several yards away. She had caught something – a piece of gravel perhaps – in her shoe and was balancing on one foot while she lifted the other behind her and twisted around to free her heel of its irritation. He didn’t normally notice clothes – not such a strong eyewitness after all, perhaps – but he remembered her sleeveless dress was simple and fairly short, the colour of a favourite pair of suede shoes Chloë had forcibly retired and not let him replace, a brown somewhere between bread crust and butterscotch. It was either very well cut or she had an excellent figure; without her inside it would surely have looked like a sack. Her arms and legs were lightly tanned and her short hair hung across her face as she arched backwards. She was anonymous and elegant, and elegance in a busy general hospital was as unexpected as dancing.

Then she stood upright again, glanced at her watch and looked about her, looking straight through him, with a hot, cross expression on her face, and he was sure it was her, even with the shorter, discreetly coloured hair. She took a step or two away from him then stopped and
repeated the gesture because whatever was wrong in her shoe was still not right, and he looked again at her heel and flexing calf muscle and out of nowhere had a vivid recollection of how it felt when she pressed the sole of her foot into the much bigger sole of his as they lay end to end on a sofa and laughed and said, ‘I can actually see you all the way round!’

He called her name, or said it tentatively, thinking that if it wasn’t her he could walk on and pretend he was calling out to someone else. And she looked round. It was definitely her, but she still looked straight through him and he thought
twenty years
and remembered he was in a suit and getting his father’s jowls and had greying hair. He was tempted to duck back into the crowd and walk swiftly in the opposite direction.

When she did recognize him it was such a relief he asked her out before he had gathered his wits sufficiently to be nervous. She glanced at his wedding ring, much as he did with patients, but she said yes, in a day or two, and they took out their mobiles to exchange numbers.

They never went on dates as students; they were too poor. Like all their peers they went about things in the reverse order to the practice of their parents’ generation. They had sex, realized they got on really well then fell in love. His recollection was that the love part in their case had been naïve and simple, consisting largely of saying
I do love you
a lot, usually when in bed, and hardly carried over at all into their daily lives as students. She continued to see her friends, he his, and the
two groups had no common ground. He remembered the relationship as existing within a kind of bubble. He remembered no great trauma at its ending, simply a kind of regretful, muted cadence as the relentlessly realistic demands of medicine took over. Compared to his courtship of Chloë, whom he only took up with after finals, it was a delicate, dreamlike affair conducted largely at night.

Chloë was all for the bright pragmatism of day and in many ways, looking back, it was she who courted him. She shyly got a mutual friend – a school friend who hated one of Laura’s friends for some reason – to introduce them as she confessed to having a spare ticket to their college’s ball. She took him to meet her parents – the bullying, newly titled surgeon and his polite, browbeaten shadow of a wife – and he remembered wondering if Chloë were programmed to marry medicine. Then the physical infatuation he felt with her, the disgracefully blokeish pleasure and pride her proximity aroused in him, was reinforced by the potent persuasion of suddenly feeling his life joined up. His friends knew her friends and both sides heartily approved the match. And it
was
a match, in their eyes, whereas the other, the thing with Laura, his mates had treated as odd, dirty fun, as if he’d had a girlfriend who wasn’t even a student…

All of which made them sound hateful but they weren’t. They were lovely, decent people. They cared. But far more than he, the anomalous scholarship cuckoo
in their midst, they were products of careful upbringing, insistently trained to conform, or only to rebel within carefully circumscribed parameters, and inculcated with a deep sense of insecurity when away from their own kind.

He had thought of none of this for years, twenty years, until he took Laura on a date to a restaurant where, characteristically, she insisted in advance she would be paying her share in a way that Chloë, despite a hefty trust fund, never had.

They had exchanged numbers and made a vague agreement to go out once she had had time to settle her mother back home and time to settle in herself, but he could have avoided ringing her and ignored her call if she rang him. They had run into each other just when he was especially depressed about his marriage, however, just beginning to admit to himself that it had been a mistake, so it seemed like a piece of fate. He had retained few close friends and they were all married, child-bearingly and happily so, apparently, and to voice doubts about a marriage to anyone in such a tight-knit group of people was to unstopper a baleful genie. Laura stood in isolation from the rest of his life and always had. And exes, even exes not seen in twenty years, surely knew one and understood one in ways friends never could. It was only supper, he told himself, an innocent, catch-up supper. If he told her about him and Chloë it would go no further and anyone, even Chloë, would understand friends who hadn’t seen each other in twenty years wanting to catch up.

Laura was a friend. That was his overwhelming sense in the redfaced minutes after running into her in the hospital – not that she was a former girlfriend but that she was a long-lost boon companion. Nonetheless, when Chloë rang on the afternoon of their supper and left a message – some mundane query about service charges in their block of flats – he texted her back an answer rather than risk ringing her, for fear that he might blurt out with whom he was about to spend the evening.

Luckily the restaurant was not too quiet. It was on the raised ground floor of a handsome Georgian house in a row of such houses near the county court, most of which were given over to barristers’ chambers and estate agents. The atmosphere was clubbily masculine and unfussy – with dark wood, white linen, candlelight and pretty young waitresses who sounded as though their fathers might eat there. He ordered calf’s liver, she a rare steak without the chips and, since neither of them was driving, they shared a bottle of claret. Then their waitress left them alone to talk and the twenty-year gap came home to him afresh.

They were edgily polite at first, re-establishing that Laura had moved there from Paris to care for her mother, he from London to care for his brother, then she had seemed to challenge him.

‘So you went and married Chloë Burstow,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said and heard himself apologize.

‘Are you?’ she asked. ‘Sorry, I mean?’

‘Of course. I…I…’ He fell silent.

She topped up his wine. ‘She always scared me, you know.’

‘No! Who? Chloë?’

‘Yes. She was so composed, so grown up. We all wanted to hate her, of course, because she was rich and did modelling. So we used to bitch and say how she was so reserved because she was actually very thick. People claimed she’d failed Oxbridge but then somehow been found miraculously to have passed it after all once Daddy made a donation to the college.’

‘Mummy. It’s her mother that had the money. She married down but, because he got a handle for services to medicine, people didn’t always realize.’

‘
Ah, bon?
’

‘And Chloë isn’t stupid, not at all. She’s just not…’ He shuffled his wineglass.

‘Clever,’ Laura supplied.

‘No,’ he admitted then glanced up. ‘You’re laughing at me, aren’t you?’

‘I’m in deadly earnest.’

‘It’s odd,’ he said. ‘I can’t think clearly when I’m near her. My only power in the marriage comes when we’re apart. She may not be a brain surgeon but there’s a persuasive strength to her that…’ He broke off, seeing Laura was frowning. ‘Sorry. This is the last thing you want to talk about.’

‘Nonsense. It’s your last twenty years. What else are we going to talk about?’

Then she smiled with a bracing kind of solicitude and he knew he could tell her anything. ‘I think the marriage is probably over,’ he admitted. He had told nobody this until then. ‘We’re not divorced or anything. But having to move here for a bit because of Bobby and being without her has made me see things more clearly. It’s only a question of time and courage. We never loved each other. Not really. I think we both see that now.’

‘Honestly?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he admitted slowly, as much to himself as her. ‘I think she probably loves me. In some awful way I think she loves me more as she senses me withdrawing from her. Her father’s such a bastard I benefit by comparison without even trying. She sort of needs me to balance him. She thinks I’m good. The Good Doctor.’

‘And aren’t you?’

‘I’m just a doctor who hasn’t put money first. That hardly makes me a saint. But she…We haven’t spoken properly, not honestly, for ages. She forwards my mail and sometimes scribbles cross little notes on the back of it.’

‘Doesn’t she ring you?’

He sighed.

She smiled wistfully. ‘Oh dear. Of course she rings. Are there children?’

‘No, thank God. But that’s one of the things that made me realize about us. She wants them desperately. We can’t seem to have them and although she’s quite prepared to adopt I realized I wasn’t because I didn’t
want to have children with her. I suddenly knew I couldn’t make that commitment. And then Mum dying and Bobby going to pieces gave me the perfect escape route. Isn’t that pathetic?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘A bit male but not pathetic. Poor her, though.’

‘Not really. Well. Okay. Poor her.’

And as if by mutual consent, Chloë was not mentioned between them again all evening.

She wasn’t quite the Laura he remembered, but then both their younger selves had been keeping things back, posing even, in their eagerness to make, then sustain, an impression. She was still solemn and funny, still keener to make him talk than to reveal much herself, but something since they had parted, Paris perhaps, other men more than possibly, had led her to develop, what? An edge? That sounded unpleasant and it wasn’t that. A strength, then, he did not remember. It suited her, like her quiet, carefully chosen clothes and shorter hair, whose colour she dismissed, when he admired it, as
enhanced mouse
.

‘Why Paris?’ he asked.

‘I was terribly unhappy.’ She tore open the bread roll she had carefully chosen when they were offered, but didn’t eat it. She sipped her wine then saw he was waiting for more. ‘No,’ she said. ‘That sounds too dramatic and it wasn’t. Not a breakdown or anything. But I’d lost my way and made some stupid mistakes and had a really stupid, damaging relationship I never should have had.
It gave me a fresh start of sorts. It was a sort of rather overdue finishing school.’ She smiled at herself then up at him. ‘Then it became a habit. You never said you had a brother who needed looking after. You only ever said he was a bit camp.’

‘You know how students are. Reinventing themselves. Grabbing the chance to be defined on their own terms for once. You never said your parents were naturists.’

‘Can you blame me? It was bad enough they were academics and sent me to a state school. I’d never have heard the end of it. I’d have been a pariah.’

‘You? Never.’ But he remembered his judgemental friends and mutely agreed with her.

‘Yes I would. My friends were the rebels, remember.’

‘That dreadful tramp with the hair. Ruby.’

‘Amber.’ She laughed softly to herself. ‘Whatever became of her? City, probably. A real ball-buster in a Prada suit.’

‘And that skinny boy.’

‘Tristram? Poor Tris. It was when everyone, even straight boys, was trying to be Sebastian Flyte and he looked like the Emcee from
Cabaret
. Completely unwholesome.’

‘He used to unnerve me because I’d hear him chattering away in your room as I came up those stairs and the second I came in he’d go silent and watchful. I never got a word out of him. And she made me so nervous.’

‘Tris fancied the pants off you.’

‘He
didn’t
. He just thought I was prematurely middle-aged and uncool.’

‘Well, yes. But he still had gangbang fantasies about you and your Wykehamist hearties. You know the things state school poofs dream about boarding school…’

‘Lies. All of it.’

‘Yeah. Right.’

‘So what became of him? You said
poor Tris
.’

‘Oh. The expected.’

Their waitress approached with food and Laura’s gravity vanished as she smiled up at her and said thanks.

‘He was one of the earliest ones,’ she went on once they were alone again. ‘Died, what, two years after we’d…I think he was much wilder than he ever let on to Amber.’

‘He probably died on my ward. God.’

‘Really?’

‘Back then there wasn’t a wide range of places to send people.’

Blood ran out of her steak as she sliced it open, which she casually mopped up with a piece of bread. He must have been looking disconcerted because she caught his eye and said, ‘Sorry. What can I say? Paris.’

Later on, when their coffee arrived, they sat back a little, watching each other while the waitress cleared detritus off their table. She smiled to herself once they were alone again.

‘The next bit’s much easier in French,’ she said.

‘What would happen in French?’ he asked.

‘Oh, something eloquent and brief, like a shrug or an
et alors
.’