The Making of Us (12 page)

But although Daniel had praised her hair and her general levels of personal upkeep, he had not tried to kiss her that night, nor any of the other nights that followed. And then one night they’d met, for Chinese she recalled, she’d deliberately packed some Polo mints into her handbag to mask the garlic, just in case, and he’d said: ‘Maggie, I want to thank you for being my friend. I am a lonely man and I have lived a lonely life and I do not have many friends. But I count you, Maggie, as a good friend. A very good friend.’

Maggie’s smile had frozen in place. He was going to dump her, she’d thought, dump her before he’d even kissed her. She’d felt her heart ache with sadness.

‘So I hope that you won’t mind if I burden you with the fact of my condition? Which I learned of only today, so excuse me if I am not quite myself. But it appears that I have a large tumour, in my lung. This is what has been causing the pain in my back. And beyond that it also seems that I have secondary cancer in my legs and in my stomach. So … it
seems
,’ he laid his large hands flat upon the table, ‘that there is not a lot that can be done for me. It seems that I am to die.’

Maggie had clasped her hands to her mouth and stifled a squeal. Then she’d let them fall to her lap and stared at Daniel in mute horror. ‘No,’ she’d said, ‘no!’

He’d smiled then. It struck her as a strange time for him to expend a smile, when they were seemingly in such short supply. It was almost, she’d felt, as though he were happy about it. No, not happy, just relieved.

‘It is fine, Maggie, it is fine. It is
destiny
, you know? I never saw myself as an old man, and now … well, sixty would have been nice, but fifty-three? Fifty-three will just have to do …’

But inside Maggie’s head, a little voice was still saying: No, no, no. Inside Maggie’s head was the sound of shattered dreams and a broken heart. Fifty-three would not do, would not do
at all
.

They’d managed two more dinners after that, before Daniel had to go in for chemotherapy. He’d told her not to visit him in the hospital but she had, catching him in his cotton pyjamas – pale-blue edged with cream piping. His slippers were tucked underneath the bed and a copy of the
Telegraph
lay on the tray in front of him and he was wearing half-moon reading glasses. She’d never seen them before. They made him look, of course, more intelligent, but also more vulnerable. Her heart turned over with love. But he’d removed them with a haste that suggested vanity when he saw her approaching over the top of them.

‘Oh,’ she’d said, ‘you wear glasses.’

‘I usually wear lenses,’ he’d muttered distractedly, ‘but I thought, on top of everything else, here, in this place, all this,’ he indicated the medical paraphernalia surrounding him, ‘did I need to be fiddling around with those little things? Also, I thought I would not see anyone who knows me.’ She searched his face for a sign that he was teasing her, that really he was secretly delighted that she had disobeyed his instructions and come to see him. But there was none.

‘Sorry,’ she’d said, nervously, trying not to cry. ‘Couldn’t bear to think of you here, all alone. And I brought you some fruit, look.’ She pulled a carrier from her shoulder bag and took three green apples and two bananas out of it. She laid them on his tray and immediately wished she had not brought the fruit. It looked insensitively healthy. And also clichéd.

Daniel didn’t look at the fruit. Instead he looked at her wanly and sighed. She thought he was about to complain about the fruit, tell her she was a fool to bring him fruit, that he was too ill to eat fruit, that he did not even
like
fruit, but he didn’t. Instead he took her hand in his and as Maggie glanced at him she saw a single tear roll down his cheek. ‘Thank you,’ he whispered, ‘you are a very good person.’

‘You are very welcome.’ She smiled compassionately and handed him a tissue. ‘Very, very welcome.’

In some ways, she pondered over the intervening months, it was a bit unfair that she had finally, after nearly twenty years on her own, started to fall in love with someone, and then he got terminally ill. If she wasn’t such a positive, glass half full kind of person, she’d almost say it was typical. But it wasn’t typical. It was atypical. Generally her life ran quite smoothly and in a vaguely upward direction. Generally Maggie got what she wanted, but then, Maggie didn’t really ask for much. So instead of seeing the impending death of her new boyfriend as a bad thing, Maggie decided to view it as a gift. An opportunity to make a difference to someone’s life. A chance to care. And so, for the last few months, that was what Maggie had done. Instead of being Daniel’s girlfriend, she became his carer. Instead of waiting by the phone for him to call and fantasising about engagement rings and white weddings, Maggie did his shopping for him and managed his medication. Instead of sitting opposite him in low-lit restaurants and meeting him for picnics on sunny afternoons, she accompanied him on hospital appointments and cooked him stews.

He was close to the end now. It could be days, it could be weeks, but certainly no more than a handful. He was thin and his face had lost its previous perfect symmetry, hanging slack in places, knotted with tension in others. In the hours when he was in pain, the morphine rendered him silent and still. She missed him then and felt a sense of his life force draining away through his grey skin and into sticky puddles on the floor below his bed. But on good days, when his body held more essential spirit than opiates, she and Daniel would talk until his mouth began to chafe with dryness or sleep pulled him back into silence. Maggie sensed that the conversations they had during these moments were more candid and open than any of the conversations they’d had during the preceding months, when they’d shared wine in restaurants and enjoyed the fanciful notion that both of them would remain alive for at least another twenty years.

In a Thai restaurant on their fourth date she’d asked him about his mother. He’d shrugged, as though someone’s mother could not possibly be of any real interest to another person. ‘She is very old,’ he’d said after a moment. ‘She is not the person she used to be.’

‘And what sort of person did she use to be?’ Maggie had gently urged.

He’d shrugged again. ‘A different person,’ he’d said. ‘You know?’

‘Where does she live?’

‘In France,’ he’d replied, with a note of exasperation.

She’d wanted to push it: where in France? With whom: brothers, sisters, grandchildren, a cat – alone? But she had felt his impatience and she’d let him change the subject. But today he’d volunteered something new: his mother lived in a home. In Dieppe. And then this: he had a brother. The brother lived near the home in Dieppe and visited her every day. ‘I feel no guilt,’ he said, ‘for my mother. She is old. She doesn’t know that she is in a home. She doesn’t know who she is. But my brother, every day he has to get into his sad little car and drive across the sad little town where he lives and on to the grey highway, to that big house by the sea where it always smells of fish and spume, and sit with a woman with glassy eyes and cold hands who used to be his mother. And she will not know him and then he will leave and feel guilty that she is on her own until he makes the same journey the next day.’

‘What about his wife, his family?’

‘He has no wife, no family. He is like me. He is alone. So, we die and our line dies with us.’ He coughed then and Maggie passed him a cup of squash.

‘Oh, well, you never know,’ she said, light-heartedly, ‘that’s the thing with being a man. There might be a little you out there somewhere and you just don’t know it.’ She let out a small tinkle of laughter and glanced at him, checking she hadn’t crossed yet another invisible line.

He pulled his eyelids tight over his eyes and smiled wryly. ‘Maybe,’ he chuckled. Then he sighed. ‘Maybe. After all, anything is possible.’

Maggie smiled too, relieved that she had amused rather than aggravated the man that she loved. And then she watched him, attentively and adoringly, as he drifted slowly back into a thick fug of drug-induced sleep.

Robyn’s life had turned into a novel. One of those novels with shoes on the cover. And it was about a girl called Robyn who meets a man in a clothes shop whilst selling him a brown jumper and how he waits outside the clothes shop for her to finish work and then takes her to a beautiful bar in the basement of a smart restaurant in the beating heart of Soho where they drink pretty cocktails with cherry blossoms and pink vodka and talk for so long that the trains stop running and the evening turns to deepest night and they have to walk for half an hour to find taxis to take them home. It then follows the heroine and this man (his name is Jack) on every wonderful, joyous, honeyed, romantic cliché as they meet up again and again in locations such as London parks on sunny afternoons, floating restaurants on canals, pub beer gardens hung with fairy lights, art galleries, sweaty gigs and art-house cinemas to see films with subtitles.

The man called Jack turned out to be twenty-seven years old and, of course, since Robyn’s life was now a novel, not a bank teller or a student or a direct marketing account executive but a novelist. An actual published novelist. He did not write fat books with shoes on the cover, but slim books with out-of-focus photographs on the cover and one-word titles. He’d had his first book published when he was twenty-five, his second last year and was now halfway through his third. And because this was a novelised vision of real life, he had, of course, just sold the film rights to his first book for tens of thousands of pounds, so even though his books didn’t sell that many copies, his bank account was healthy enough for him to keep on suggesting more and more idyllic locations for their rendezvous and to slip £20 notes into her pockets to pay for cabs, on the nights when she went home.

More and more frequently, though, Robyn didn’t go home. She stayed at Jack’s, a suitably photogenic shabby little one-bed place in a fat stucco house on a leafy Holloway square with rattly sash windows and gnarled wooden floors and an oversized wrought-iron bed with an abstract painting hung crookedly above it. She did indeed pad barefoot around his shabby but lovely flat in his oversized sweaters, and drink tea out of his giant Starbucks mugs whilst curled up on his scruffy but elegant sofa, with his head in her lap, running her fingers through his glossy hair. She had never felt more beautiful in her life and she had never felt more as if the life she was living was the life that she had always been destined to live, mapped out millennia before in stars a billion light years away.

When she was away from Jack she would pick through the photos on her iPhone of the two of them, arms outstretched, heads touching, beaming into the lens. She took a lot of photos these days: the view from Jack’s window, Jack’s hands around a glass, an arrangement of their possessions on a pub table, the back of Jack’s head, the dents in their empty pillows caught in the early sunlight of a Saturday morning. No detail was too small or insignificant; no aspect of their union was unworthy of a visual record. Jack teased her about it: ‘I’ve just dropped a lump of hummus on the kitchen floor – quick, take a picture!’

But Robyn couldn’t help herself; if her life was a novel then she was making the film of the book. Just in case, she supposed. In case it all went wrong. Because in books with shoes on the cover something always goes wrong. Girl meets boy. Girl falls in love with boy. Boy and girl have a stupid misunderstanding and split up.

But Robyn could not possibly conceive of how this perfect union of two such compatible and uncomplicated people could ever find a way to unspool itself.

And when it did she knew that she was no longer living in a novel with shoes on the cover but in a novel with an out-of-focus photo on the cover and a one-word title.

She’d thought it already, even before Nush had said anything. She’d thought it, if she was honest, from the very first time she’d seen him. She’d made him wait two weeks before sleeping with him, not in some pathetic attempt to keep him on the boil or to assert her feminine wiles, and not, even, to prolong the giddy innocence of those first few dates. Robyn didn’t play games and she didn’t politicise sex. The reason she’d made him wait was because of a tiny nagging sense of unease deep in the centre of her psyche. She couldn’t place it or name it, but it was there, lurking like a strange man in the shadows.

She’d overridden it, of course.

She was in love.

She was gorgeous.

He was gorgeous.

She needed a better reason than nagging unease to reject his advances. And actually, from the moment their relationship was consummated, the feeling passed.

Other things happened over the couple of weeks, but she ignored them as the possibility that her initial misgivings might have been founded on something real was too unpalatable to contemplate.

There was a conversation, on the decked balcony of his friends’ shared house in Tufnell Park. He’d already told her that his father was dead. That had been ascertained on their first date. Her father was an anonymous sperm donor. His father was dead, in a car crash when Jack was eight months old. It had bonded them together. ‘Poor us,’ Robyn had said, ‘never seen our fathers’ faces,’ and they’d made sad faces at each other and then laughed. Not that it was funny, but they were laughing because they were allowed to laugh, because it was their sad thing and they retained the rights over it.

Robyn met Jack’s mum, Sam, a month into their relationship. She was a nice-looking woman with extravagantly highlighted hair which she wore piled on top of her head with a big mother-of-pearl clasp. She was luxuriantly middle class, in Sweaty Betty leisurewear and bare feet, and her little two-bed cottage just outside St Albans was a perfect late-nineties stage set of Designers Guild furnishings and antique pine.

She called Robyn ‘darling’ and greeted her with a kiss on each cheek and a look of fascinated affection. They sat in a battered pine kitchen with a butler’s sink and a pale yellow Aga and Sam smoked Marlboro Lights by the back door, blowing the smoke out of the side of her mouth where it was immediately picked up by the breeze and brought back into the kitchen.