The One Before the One (16 page)

He takes a breath.

‘Maybe we could meet at an auction one day and you could see how we buy stuff for the stall. I could impress you with my knowledge of 1950's Danish sofa-beds.’

His eyes twinkle humorously. Was this him asking me on a date? Maybe Lexi was right, maybe he did like me.

‘Maybe,’ I say.

He shrugs, disappointed. ‘Okay.’

I walk back, clutching Lexi’s appointments book in my hand and thinking about what Wayne had said. What could she have told him that she didn’t feel she could tell me? Didn’t she feel she could confide in me? Wasn’t I approachable? I thought, after the pregnancy scare and the drunken confession that Clark had dumped her, that this was it, that we’d got to the bottom of it, but maybe I was wrong.

I did feel guilty about lying through my teeth to Lexi about going to Brighton – horribly guilty, especially since she’d asked to come with me – but, at the end of the day, I reasoned, this could all be worth it in the long run. It felt a bit like the lying you do before you throw someone a surprise party – horrid and necessary all at the same time.

All the more horrid because she’d asked to come with me.

‘Brighton?’ she said. ‘For two days?’ Her little face fell and I felt a stab of guilt, like an irresponsible parent lying through their teeth so that they could elope for a dirty weekend with their lover, which, of course, was what I was basically doing.

The story went like this: Toby and I were going to see a potential client in Brighton on the Friday and Saturday. The entertaining might run over on Saturday night – these people are quite the party animals, we’ve heard – so we’d spend Saturday night there as well as Friday night. Rachel was away on business in Scotland so she wouldn’t know a thing.

‘Can I come?’ she asked, and my heart flipped.

‘No, Lex, sorry, it’s a serious work thing – no time for play.’

I spent the best part of thirty quid on DVDs for her and
pizza and a bottle of Lambrusco, and then I left her on Friday morning just before she went off to work.

‘I’ll call you, okay?’ I said.

‘Okaaay,’ she said, not even looking at me. And then I had to run, so that I wouldn’t turn back, feeling like I was leaving her at the gates of a boarding school.

Toby is standing next to WH Smith, when I get to Victoria Station, reading the paper.

‘Hello,’ I say, leaning in to give him a kiss, but he pulls away.

‘Not here,’ he whispers. ‘Not here, Caroline, where someone might see us.’

I feel a little miffed. Did he have to be quite so guarded? Wasn’t I worth a little risk? I mean, what were the chances, after all?

‘Sorry.’ I look at the floor.

‘It’s okay, let’s just get on the train, shall we? Let’s just get there.’

Yes, let’s just get there, I think, feeling a little better. Let’s just get there and it will all be fine.

I’ve played this scene over and over in my head. We get on the train, we sit next to each other in the sunlight, me leaning my head on his, as the city rolls into suburbia and into the familiar, faded glory of Brighton.

There’ll be the constant, romantic cry of gulls, a brilliant blue sky against the white-washed pavilions and cavernous seafront houses as perhaps we doze, contented, his breath warm on my face, the rise and fall of his chest next to mine.

In reality, we can’t find a seat next to each other. It’s the summer holidays, and the train is packed with noisy kids, squabbling siblings and harassed parents with bags of sandwiches and backpacks bulging with children’s plastic toys. We end up sitting, me on a table seat with a family and Toby
on the other side of the carriage next to a woman working on a laptop. We can’t even speak to each other. I try to catch Toby’s eye, but he’s reading the paper, completely immersed, unreachable so I have no other option but to stare out of the window, the knot in my stomach growing tighter. Was he thinking about Rachel? Feeling guilty? Because I sure was. It was becoming very inconvenient. I’d be doing something, like now, just leaning against the train window trying to relax or dropping off to sleep when she’d appear in my head with her beautiful smile and her kind eyes, speaking that line from her email:
SO lovely to meet you finally on Saturday although you ran off a bit suddenly! I’m just checking … we didn’t scare you off, did we?

It was so much easier before I’d met her, so much easier when I couldn’t picture her, when she wasn’t real to me.

As we step off the train, into the vast Victorian arches of Brighton Central Station, which smells of sun cream and holidays, however, my heart lifts. The sun is shining, warming the station like a tropical indoor garden. Toby takes my hand. ‘You ready for the seaside, then, Steeley?’ he says, kissing my head.

The hotel couldn’t be more perfect: a boutique-style, double-fronted villa, opulently decorated with swathes of red velvet and plush cream upholstery. Our room is tasteful and bathed in sunlight, with a view of the sea from the long sash window.

I put my bags down and lean against the windowframe, looking out over the view; the sea glittering with sunlight, the old, burned-down pier like a gigantic, many-legged spider rising from the sea, the sky, a clear swimming-pool blue with just the one cloud floating across it, like a lost spirit from another world. Toby comes up behind me and wraps his arms around me, kissing my neck.

‘We could just stay here for the afternoon,’ he says,
punctuating each word with a kiss. ‘Have endless sex, Martini on the rocks, take a bath like we did in the Malmaison hotel …’

I unwrap his arms and wander into the bathroom.

‘They’ve only got a shower,’ I say. ‘Anyway, I quite fancy going out.’

‘Really? Now?’ He says.

‘Yeah, come on.’ The knot in my stomach is stubborn, it won’t seem to lift. ‘We haven’t come all the way to Brighton to sit in our room all day.’

‘Oh. All right, cool,’ says Toby, nodding his head slowly. ‘Well, what do you want to do?’

‘Gosh, there’s loads of stuff to do,’ I say, shifting from one foot to the other. ‘We’re at the seaside, we do seasidey things.’

‘Right,’ says Toby. ‘Yes, of course.’

‘Paddling, the pier, fish and chips, wandering around the Lanes.’

‘What’s the lanes?’ says Toby

‘The shopping bit,’ I say. ‘Didn’t you have a wander round when we were down for that think-in weekend in April?’

‘Um, yeah but I didn’t much take it in, you know …’

We walk down to the seafront, dodging rollerbladers on the promenade, street cartoonists angling for business.

‘Let’s get our portraits done,’ says Toby, spontaneously.

I look at him, incredulous. ‘Are you serious?’

‘Yeah, why not? It’ll be a laugh and we’re at the seaside, aren’t we? Isn’t that what you do at the seaside? Eat candy-floss, get portraits done.’

I wonder if this approach may be missing the point.

‘Well, I don’t want mine done,’ I say, searching his face for signs that he might still be joking (there are none). ‘But you go ahead, I’ll watch you, it’s fine.’

So I sit down on a deckchair next to Toby who sits on a stool that’s far too small for him, so that his legs come right up to his chin, making him look rather ludicrously like a garden
gnome. The man silently sketches away and Toby arranges his face in a fixed grin, as do I. It seems to take ages.

This was bizarre. Did he think I was mad? That I would actually want to pay someone to make me look ridiculous, accentuate my already big nose and the height of my forehead? I think I’d rather die.

‘There we are, sir. Do you like?’ After what seems like an eternity, the cartoonist turns the paper around to reveal Toby in cartoon form: bushy eyebrows, accentuated quiff, enormous chin, gigantic toothy smile. He looks like a cross between Bruce Forsyth and Tintin.

Toby starts guffawing. ‘Look at it! Hilarious! That is brilliant.’

I laugh too.

‘That’s brilliant,’ I say, not quite being able to muster enthusiasm.
Now can we get the hell out of here before the man starts sketching me?

The afternoon is close and warm and we while away the hours, like young lovers on their first break away.

We roll up our jeans and paddle in the sea, where Toby splashes my jeans till they’re soaked to the knee, then lifts me up and pretends to throw me in. We get ice creams with flakes and wander down the pier, giggling as we try to eat them before they melt. We sit outside a bar called Hercules, hand in hand, listening to the people inside doing karaoke in the air-conditioned darkness whilst the sun blares outside.

Eventually, woozy with lager, we make our way to the amusement arcade, where plump, sunburnt couples, the women with dumpy knees and wearing strappy vests too tight for them, the men with stomachs like beachballs, put coin after coin in the fruit machines. I win £1.22 on the penny waterfall and buy us each candyfloss. Then we go on the waltzers where I turn puce and Toby laughs at me.

Anybody watching us might think we were in some sort
of British rom-com, a film about two young lovers on a lost weekend, but inside my head I know the soundtrack’s not playing. I know I’m not feeling it.

We go for coffee at a fish and chips restaurant on the front. The clouds have closed in now, a breeze has picked up, and what was a dazzling, blue sea before, dancing with sunlight, now looks rather brown and flat.

I watch Toby carrying the coffees over to me. He’s smiling and I smile back, but I’m aware of an unpleasant feeling seeping through my bones, a sense of detachment, like I’m here in body but not really in mind. Like I’m watching myself, just going through the motions.

Toby puts the coffee down in front of me. ‘You all right?’ he says. ‘You look a bit peaky. Still feeling sick from the waltzers?’

‘I’m fine,’ I say, forcing the corners of my mouth upwards.

He sits down, his face lit by the light of the window and I think how incredibly handsome he is, with his fringe in a sea-swept quiff, the two-day shadow, the perfectly arched eyebrows, the way his front teeth rest slightly on his pouty bottom lip, giving him a vulnerable quality, a boyishness.

He starts talking to me –
Wasn’t it funny when,
he’s saying, and I’m nodding and saying something or other, but other sounds – the ever-present cry of gulls, the echoey clatter of cutlery as the white-haired, gummy couples eat their fish and chips in silence – are drowning him out, as is the voice inside my head. Because here, in this rather shabby café with its tacky, jarring posters of Hawaiian scenes, I am suddenly seeing things as they really are.

This is just an illusion. This is not real. We can come to Brighton, have mad passionate sex in an expensive hotel, lark about on the pier, play at couples all we want, but we are not one. Christ, outside of the bedroom, we even struggle with knowing what the other likes to do. So what’s the point,
I’m beginning to think as Toby is rattling on, of being here, of him bringing me here, of me fancying him and loving him at all, if nothing’s going to actually happen, if nothing is to change? Sometimes I feel like this is all so futile, like I’m putting all my energies into something that eventually will be nothing but a speck on Toby Delaney’s relationship history. But I’ve burnt my bridges with this one. All the courting is over and the coy games. I’m too far under.

‘Do you love her?’ It just flies out of my mouth.

‘Love who?’

‘Rachel, Toby. Your wife – remember her?’

He laughs, awkwardly. ‘What’s brought this on?’

‘I just want to know. Do you, or not?’

It strikes me as I say this that I’ve always assumed he doesn’t, and how absurd that is now I’ve met her, since she’s beautiful and charming and I can’t see what there is
not
to love about her and what does it say about him if he doesn’t? But then, I am also terrified he’s going to say ‘yes’. So, this is a pivotal moment. This moment, in this decrepit café, basically decides the future for us. If it’s ‘no’, then what? He has to leave her. Things must change. And if it’s ‘yes’, then I must leave, get on a train and go home. Either way, I’m aware that, for the first time in my life, I feel totally out of control in a relationship. Not just at the mercy of somebody else’s feelings, but their feelings for somebody else. Then he says:

‘You know, it’s shit, really. We don’t have sex any more. We sleep in separate bedrooms, we don’t really talk …’

I remember the tour around the house. What Rachel said about the post-coital cigarette and having to have the window open.

‘But Rachel said …’

Toby wafts his hands.

‘She was just covering up,’ he says. ‘She’s always fucking working, Caroline. Working, working, working. Not that I’m
complaining about that, of course. It makes it easier to see you, to do this.’ He puts a hand on mine. ‘We’ve had a good time today, hey? Just you and me, different place, not having to worry about people seeing us. I’ve had a ball.’

‘Me too,’ I say. ‘But don’t you, you know …’

‘What, gorgeous?’

His voice is so tender, it kills me.

‘Worry about this? About what we’re doing? It was sort of okay before I met her, Toby, but now, it’s a whole new level, isn’t it? A whole new level of lies and deceit. I mean, doesn’t she suspect?’

‘Who, Rachel?’

‘Yes!’ Sometimes I wonder if Toby has even forgotten she exists. ‘I made such a fucking idiot of myself at the barbecue, got so drunk.’

‘Come on, you weren’t that bad, and it was funny.’

‘Funny?’ I can’t believe he just said that. ‘It wasn’t funny for me, I was dying in there, Toby. First, it was the tour around your marital home – I had to stand there and listen whilst she filled me in on your morning ablutions. Then, there was the trying to pair me up with people in your photo album.’

‘Oh, Steeley! I’ve told you I was double-bluffing.’

‘Whatever, it was awful. How do you think that made me feel? Anyway, then to top it all off, as if the whole thing wasn’t totally hideous enough, I went and blurted out the
Fever Pitch
thing and it was so bad and so obviously plucked out of thin air and so clear we hadn’t fucking read it or read anything for the book club, she MUST have said something!’

Toby shakes his head.

‘Nothing.’

‘Really?’

‘Not a word. She suspects nothing. Seriously. You have to
remember that Rachel is a woman who’s very wrapped up in her own world. She’s not home till 9 p.m. most nights; she spends two weekends a month working away – which is why we can do this trip. I mean, we don’t do stuff like this, for example, just sit in a café and have a chat. I can’t remember the last time we did that, in fact, or got a takeaway together or had fun. We’ve had so much fun today,’ he says, and I realize he has, that he has not a care in the world. ‘The truth is, Rachel never bloody talks to me, CS, never mind wonders whether I’m seeing someone else.’