You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me (12 page)

‘Stop! Please, stop.’ Neve picked up her mug but the tea was stone cold. She was tempted to bellow to Bridie to stick the kettle on, because then she’d bustle in and make Max stop talking, but from the sound of raised voices in the bar,
Midsomer Murders
had reached a particularly exciting bit and Neve didn’t have the heart to disturb her. ‘Obviously I haven’t ironed out all the kinks in the plan, but Celia says that ninety-nine per cent of all men are commitment-phobic and a three-month, no-strings affair is about all they can handle.’

‘I don’t think a no-strings affair is anything that
you
could handle, though. Not at the moment anyway,’ Max noted, and all of a sudden Neve felt as unclothed and vulnerable as she had done that other night. Underneath all that hackneyed charm and scruffy clothing, Max’s perception was razor-sharp. ‘So what would this faux relationship involve?’

Neve wasn’t going to say another word on the topic. She really wasn’t. Except her mind was already going to that happy place where there’d be ‘long Sunday-afternoon walks, even if it was raining, because it’s invigorating walking in the rain with someone else, rather than being on your own. And then when you got home and dried off, there’d be tea and toast and a black and white film on BBC2 with Bette Davis in it. Or maybe there wouldn’t, but it wouldn’t matter because then we could do the crossword together. But if the weather was dry then we could go for a drive in the country and visit National Trust houses. I really must get round to joining the National Trust,’ she heard herself say dreamily.

Then Neve blinked her eyes and came back to earth where Max was looking at her as if she’d been speaking Mandarin.

‘Really?’ he said. ‘Is that what happens in relationships?’

‘Well, I’m sure you know more about relationships than I do,’ Neve said shortly, stiffening her spine and attempting to look more in control.

Max pulled a face. ‘You know how Mariah Carey doesn’t do stairs?’ Neve shook her head but Max didn’t seem to notice. ‘Well, I don’t do relationships. Just can’t see the point in being with one woman, and not being allowed to have sex with anyone else. I’m far too young and pretty for that kind of commitment.’

‘You’re absolutely unbelievable,’ Neve told him, but it was impossible not to be amused and maybe a tiny bit envious. Life must be so easy when you looked like Max. ‘Look, I don’t expect you to understand, but I just want to get a feel for the kind of relationship and see what areas I need to improve on.’ That sounded better – more businesslike.

‘I see.’ Max was straight-faced, but his eyes gleamed with amusement. ‘And do you have any candidates lined up?’

‘Well, no. It’s more in the planning stage.’ Neve fixed Max with a stern look. ‘All that Sunday-afternoon stuff I’ll do with William; it’s the meat and potatoes stuff that I need to practise – like knowing what to say and do when I go out on dates and well, I’ve never even shared a bed with a man, and how do you negotiate who sleeps on which side and when to turn the light out and who’s going to get stuck with the lumpy pillow?’ Neve didn’t know why she kept talking and talking. Because the more she talked, and the more she tried to justify her fuzzy ideas on relationships to Max, the more fuzzy they became and the more out of reach.

‘So, can I put my name down on the list? Do you have a list?’ Max asked, pushing away his empty glass and looking hopefully at the door as if he expected Bridie to materialise with another pint of Stella.

‘What list? I don’t have a list! You’re not taking this seriously.’ Neve realised that her grey tunic had become rucked up and was displaying her splayed thighs, so she made adjustments. ‘You just said that you don’t do relationships.’

‘I don’t, but you made them sound such fun and if you don’t want to have sex, then you’re not going to mind if I get my jollies somewhere else.’ He lowered his lashes. ‘I have
needs.’

Neve didn’t know why she’d bothered trying to shine some light on the darkest, most secret places of her psyche. In fact, she didn’t even know why she’d come to the pub to suffer this emotional abuse when she could have been tucked up on her sofa with a nice bowl of home-made vegetable soup and the new issue of the
London Review of Books
. She got to her feet and stuck out her hand in Max’s general direction. ‘It was nice to see you again but I really have to go now.’

‘Oh, don’t be like that.’ Max took her hand but only so he could stroke her knuckles. ‘You really have to stop taking everything so personally. It must be exhausting.’

‘Goodbye,’ Neve said sharply, removing her hand from Max’s grasp and snatching up bag, coat, scarf, hat and gloves, and wishing that it wasn’t winter because it was impossible to make a speedy getaway when you had so much cold-weather gear to put on first. ‘Tell Bridie to put your drinks on the Slater tab,’ she added, because God forbid that Max should think ill of her. Or
more
ill of her.

‘So you don’t fancy meeting up again?’ Max persisted, though Neve didn’t know why, because she thought she’d made her position perfectly clear. ‘Swap war stories?’

‘I don’t have any war stories,’ Neve said, and in that moment she felt that she never would. That every night would be spent creeping round her flat in her socks with the telly turned down so low that she could barely hear it, so in the end she’d have no other option but to escape into the pages of books where there were other girls falling in and out of love but not her. Never her. She stared down at the scuffed toes of her faux Ugg boots in sudden and tired defeat.

‘If you don’t have any war stories, then at least you don’t have any war wounds,’ Max said, so quietly that Neve had to strain her ears to catch his words. ‘Take my number.’

It was impossible to tell someone to their face that you didn’t want to see them again because everything they said rubbed you raw, as if they’d taken a gigantic Brillo pad to your soul. It was much easier to limply hand over her phone and watch Max tap in his number, though Neve vowed she’d delete it as soon as she got home.

On Monday morning, after her second sleepless night brooding over the conversation she’d had with Max in the Hat and Fan’s snug, Neve trudged down her stairs with heavy feet and a heavy heart. She was still mentally berating herself for how much she’d over-shared, and planned to spend most of the day trying to sort out her confused thoughts about light-hearted affairs and no-strings relationships. Then she caught sight of the blue airmail envelope waiting for her on the doormat.

Neve snatched it up with an excited cry, all thoughts of Max instantly banished, and only the fact that she had forty minutes to cycle to Holborn to meet Philip for breakfast before work stopped Neve from plopping down on the bottom stair and tearing it open. Instead, she had to make do with stroking it against her cheek and imagining she could feel the phantom touch of William’s hand as he wrote her name and address in his beautiful copperplate script until she caught sight of the moony smile on her face in the hall mirror.

Still, it was hard to concentrate on Philip’s latest thesis-related angst when the envelope was burning a hole in her satchel. Philip was a mature student who’d been made redundant from his job in derivatives, got divorced and come out of the closet all in the space of six months. That had been four years ago and Neve wasn’t sure that Philip had entirely got over the shock. He was an anxious-looking man in his forties who’d had to downgrade from a four-bedroom house in Chiswick to a studio flat in Ealing, and had embraced academia along with an antiquarian bookseller called Clive, although neither one was bringing him much joy.

‘… and now he says that we should be free to sleep with other people,’ he told Neve morosely as she waited for her porridge to cool down.

‘So, are you splitting up then?’ As ever, Neve resisted the urge to tell Philip that he’d be much better off without Clive, who’d tried to stick his tongue down Gustav’s throat within five minutes of being introduced to him at Neve’s birthday drinks last year. It wasn’t just that Philip had terrible taste in men, there was also the ex-wife who was currently living in the four-bedroom house in Chiswick with her twenty-three-year-old boyfriend and frittering away what was left of Philip’s redundancy package. He was really, really, really bad at choosing his life partners.

‘No, apparently we’re having an open relationship,’ Philip sniffed, his eyes suspiciously red-rimmed, as if he’d only stopped crying just before he stepped off the tube at Holborn. ‘I can’t believe that I’m forty-five and I’m still having to go through all this
Sturm und Drang
. You don’t know how lucky you are to be single and unencumbered.’

Being single didn’t feel unencumbered. It felt extremely cumbersome. ‘Well, I really think I’m almost ready to start dating,’ Neve ventured because Philip was a good candidate to test the idea on. Or maybe not, because he was looking at her with undisguised horror, eyebrows raised so they jutted out from above his half-moon spectacles.

‘Do you?’ Philip asked. ‘Really?’

Neve took a hasty gulp of her skimmed-milk latte and scalded her tongue, but that was better than having to defend her decision to date in the face of Philip’s zero encouragement. ‘I have to start sooner or later. I don’t want to end up like Our Lady of the Blessed Hankie.’

Philip shuddered. ‘No one would want to end up like that. So how were you planning to dip a toe into the choppy waters of romance?’

There was the rub. Making eyes at total strangers hadn’t worked out too well. ‘I did read a thing about speed-dating in
Skirt.’

‘Neve! You can’t! You’d be eaten alive,’ Philip gasped. ‘It would be like throwing a paraplegic Christian to the lions.’

‘You could be a little more supportive,’ Neve grumbled. ‘I said I was
almost
ready to start dating and I do have some experience of the opposite sex, you know.’ Which was true because she’d now
almost
had sex twice and she knew lots of straight men like her brother and her father and she was on first-name terms with Aziz from the all-night convenience store and Dave from the second-hand furniture shop who always called her when a new bookcase came in, and Mr Freemont at the LLA, though Neve wasn’t sure that he counted as a straight man. She didn’t like to think that he had genitals of any description.

‘Of course you do,’ Philip said soothingly. ‘Well, what about Adrian, Clive’s Assistant Manager?’

Adrian was a willowy youth whom Neve remembered from Oxford. Even when he wasn’t languidly lounging in a punt, he looked as if he should be. ‘Adrian’s gay.’

‘No, he’s not.’ Philip clicked his teeth. ‘You may have some experience with the opposite sex but your gay radar is a little shaky.’

‘It’s called a gaydar, Philip,’ Neve said gently. Philip was a terrible gay man. Since he’d plunged into further education, he tried to dress the part in corduroys and tweed jackets, but Neve always got the impression that he yearned to be back in his grey pinstripe suit. ‘Anyway, I think you have to say to Clive that you don’t want to be in anything other than a committed relationship,’ she added, anxious to steer the conversation back to Philip’s love-life rather than her own lack of one.

‘But even an open relationship is better than being without him,’ Philip said quietly, as if he was talking to himself rather than Neve. He gave her a brave but watery smile. ‘Be sure that a relationship is something you really want. Here be dragons …’

But there wouldn’t be dragons. There’d be only fun and frolics and her heart safely tucked away until William returned to claim it. Or maybe it was more important to work on reducing her girth rather than her relationship skills. Neve gave a non-committal, ‘Hmmm,’ and it was actually a relief when Philip decided they were done with the personal stuff and could get down to business. He pulled a ringbinder from his leather satchel and Neve spluttered into her coffee.

‘My God, that’s a lot of paper,’ she said accusingly. ‘Just how much have you written of your thesis since I last saw you?’

When he wasn’t beavering away at the Archive, Philip was writing his PhD dissertation on the poet Stephen Spender. Neve, for her sins, had agreed to ‘beta-read’ it for him.

‘I’m about thirty thousand words into the second draft,’ Philip said proudly. ‘But I’ve still got miles to go.’

‘OK, hand it over,’ Neve sighed, holding out her hand and mentally bracing herself for thirty thousand words on one of her least favourite poets.

Philip tutted and shook his head. ‘You know the deal, Neevy. I show you mine, if you show me yours.’

Neve kicked her satchel further under her chair. ‘But you’ve written another ten thousand words and I’ve written much, much less than that.’

‘Where are you up to?’ Philip asked, pushing his glasses up his nose so he could glare at her more effectively.

‘Lucy’s at Oxford and she’s met Charles Holden, although she thinks he’s an absolute pig at the moment,’ Neve revealed. ‘It’s odd, really, when you and I both know that meeting him set her on a path that would change her life for ever but she doesn’t even know that herself right now.’

‘Please, just hand it over,’ Philip said. ‘I want to know what happened with her father before she left for Oxford. Stop withholding.’

Neve reluctantly reached under her chair for her satchel. When the twelve cardboard boxes containing failed novelist and very, very minor poet Lucy Keener’s life and works had arrived at the Archive, Neve had left them gathering dust in her office for weeks. There were so many of them and Neve couldn’t find any details of Lucy Keener or her writings in any dead author databases, so she didn’t hold out much hope that she was going to discover one of the great unknown writers of the twentieth century. Then one afternoon when she’d run out of tapes to transcribe, she’d started flicking through Lucy’s autobiographical novel
Dancing on the Edge of the World
, about her Second World War years working at the Ministry of Information. And that was it – Neve had fallen in love, in the same way as she had when she’d opened up
Pride and Prejudice
at the local library one Saturday morning when she was twelve, or the time she’d seen her first Katharine Hepburn film, or when William had knocked on her door at Somerville College and introduced himself as her student adviser.