“Yes.”
“Do I know him?”
For a moment, Annie was tempted to upbraid him for his presumptuous use of the masculine pronoun, but she couldn’t have fun both ways: she couldn’t expect much mileage out of the photo on the fridge if she also wanted to convince him that she’d become a lesbian.
Did Duncan know him? Well, yes and no. Mostly no, she decided.
“No.”
“That’s something, I suppose. Had you . . .”
“I’m not sure I really want to talk about my situation, Duncan. It’s private.”
“I understand. But it would help me if you could answer one more question.”
“Help you how?”
“Had you met him before we . . . before I . . . before recent events?”
“We’d had contact, yes.”
“And does he . . .”
“That’s it, Duncan. Sorry.”
“Fair enough. So where does that leave us?”
“Pretty much where we were, I’d have thought. You’re seeing someone—living with someone—and I’m seeing someone. Someone looking at the situation from the outside would say that we’ve moved on. Especially you.”
Annie hoped that this outside observer spent more time looking through Gina’s window than her own.
“I know that’s what it looks like, but . . . Oh, God. Are you really going to make me go through with this?”
“With what?”
“Gina.”
“Duncan, will you listen to yourself?”
“What have I said?”
“I’m not making you do anything. If you don’t want to be with Gina, you should tell her. But it’s nothing to do with me.”
“I can’t tell her. Not if there’s nothing to tell.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Well, if I went back and said, you know, ‘Annie and I are getting back together,’ or, or, ‘Annie’s suicidal and I can’t leave her,’ I’m sure she’d understand. But I couldn’t just say, you know, ‘You’re mad,’ could I?”
“Well, no. I’d hope you wouldn’t say that to anyone.”
“So what should I say?”
“It sounds to me as though you’ve moved too quickly. You should tell her that . . . Oh, Duncan, this is absurd. A couple of weeks ago you told me you’d met somebody else, and now you want me to script the breakup.”
“I’m not asking you to script it. I just need a rough outline. Anyway, if I do say something to her, where am I going to live?”
“So you’d be prepared to carry on with her forever rather than look for a flat.”
“I was hoping to come back here.”
“I know, Duncan. But we’ve split up. It wouldn’t be appropriate.”
“Half this house is mine.”
“I’ve applied to increase the mortgage and buy you out. I don’t know whether they’ll let me, but the guy at the building society thought I had half a chance. And if you need to borrow some money before that, I can help. It seems only fair.”
The longer this conversation went on, the quicker Annie’s ambiguities and confusions cleared up. Duncan’s obvious regret helped immensely, in the usual unhealthy way. Now that she wasn’t actually being rejected, it was quite clear to her that she didn’t want to be with him a moment longer, and her sense of grievance gave her a force and clarity that she wished were always accessible to her.
“I never thought you’d be so . . . tough.”
“And I’m tough because I’ve just offered to lend you money?”
“Well, yes. You’d rather lend me money than have me back.”
And another thing: he was stingy, on top of everything else. Duncan would much rather stay in a relationship with a woman he didn’t like than lend her a few quid.
“Make me another cup of tea, will you? I’m just nipping upstairs to the loo.”
She didn’t need to go, and she didn’t want another drink, and she didn’t want Duncan to stay. But he’d have to go to the fridge for the milk, and if he went to the fridge, he couldn’t fail to notice the photo.
By the time she came back he was staring at it.
“That’s him, isn’t it?”
“I’m sorry. I should have taken it down.”
“I don’t wish to be rude. But . . . is that his son? Or grandson?”
Annie was momentarily disconcerted: she had got lost in all the layers of irony. Duncan was missing so much crucial information that all he’d been left with was a photo of a bespectacled, silver-haired man with a young boy.
“That is rude, actually.”
“I’m sorry. It just wasn’t immediately obvious.”
“It’s his son. He’s only your age.”
He wasn’t, but he could have been. More or less.
“He’s probably been around the block a couple of times, then. Any other kids?”
“Duncan, I’m sorry, but I think you should leave. I’m not comfortable with these questions.”
It really hadn’t been as much fun as she’d hoped.
She still had his e-mail, though, and she’d only read it through once. She’d printed it at work, along with the photograph, and she’d put it in an envelope, to keep it from getting dog-eared and dirtied by all the detritus at the bottom of her workbag. After she’d made herself something to eat, she sat down and unfolded it, but stood up again when she decided she’d like to wear her reading glasses. She hardly ever bothered with them.
She was reminding herself of somebody. The letter (because that’s what it was now), the glasses, the armchair . . . How many times had she watched her mother and grandmother sit down to pay proper attention to something that had come in the mail? And who were all those people who wrote to them? Names started to come back, names she hadn’t heard in years: Betty in Canada—who was Betty? Why was she in Canada? How come Gran knew her? Auntie Vi in Manchester, who wasn’t an auntie . . . When Annie was in her mid-teens, and had thus become surly and superior, she couldn’t keep herself from feeling that there was something depressing about the good cheer that invariably accompanied the arrival of those letters. Who cared if Betty’s niece was pregnant, or if Auntie Vi’s grandson was a trainee vet? If Mum and Gran weren’t so isolated and bored, none of this would be regarded as news.
And now here Annie was, allowing her day to become gloriously colored by a communication from a man she’d never even met.
ten
In the last e-mail Annie had sent Tucker, she’d posed the following question:What do you do if you think you’ve wasted fifteen years of your life?
She’d had no reply, as yet, possibly because of the domestic turmoil he’d hinted at the last time he’d written, so she’d had to address the problem on her own. She was currently working on the assumption that time was money. What would she do if she’d just lost fifteen thousand pounds? It seemed to her that there were two alternatives: you could either write it off or try to get it back. And you could try to get it back either from the person who took it from you in the first place or by trying to compensate for the loss in other ways—by selling stuff, or betting on a horse, or doing lots of overtime.
This analogy was only helpful up to a point, obviously. Time wasn’t money. Or rather, the time she was talking about couldn’t be converted into cash, like the services of a lawyer, or a prostitute. Or rather (one last “or rather,” otherwise she’d have to concede that this whole way of thinking about time wasn’t working) it could, theoretically, but nobody was going to pay her. She could knock on Duncan’s—Gina’s!—door and demand compensation for the time she’d wasted on him, but the value would be difficult to calculate, and anyway, Duncan was cheap. She didn’t want money, though. She wanted the time back, to spend on something else. She wanted to be twenty-five again.
If she hadn’t wasted so much time with Duncan, she might be better equipped to work out where it had gone; she had never been very good at algebra, and algebra was, it seemed to her, what was needed for the kind of thin
king she wanted to do. One of the traps she kept falling into—and she couldn’t help it, even though she was aware of it—was to equate time with Duncan as time generally. T = D, when of course T really equaled D + W + S + F&F + C, where W is work, S is sleep, F&F is family and friends, C is culture and so on. In other words, she’d wasted only her romantic time on Duncan, whereas life consisted of more than that. In her own defense, though, she would like to point out that D was more than just one element to rack up alongside the others. She saw his F&F, for example, as well as her own, although admittedly he had fewer of both. Who knows whether W would have been different if D hadn’t been living in the same town? She was guessing it might have been. They stayed put, doing jobs that satisfied neither of them, because finding new work in the same place at the same time would have been almost impossible. And whose C was it anyway? He was the one who bought the music and the DVDs, he was the one who didn’t like going to the theater (or to other towns to see it) . . . She couldn’t do equations, really, but she thought it was probably more likeT = W + S + F&F + C D
And there was another part of the equation that she didn’t like thinking about: her own stupidity and torpor (OST). She had played a part in all this. She had allowed her life to drift. She would have to multiply the whole bloody lot by OST, thus ending up with a number greater than the one she’d first thought of. And if it turned out she’d wasted twenty or fifty or a hundred years, then whose fault was that?
The fifteen years were gone, anyway. And what had gone with them? Children, almost certainly, and if she ever did take Duncan to court, that’s what she would sue him for. But what else? What hadn’t she done because she’d spent too much time with a boring, faithless nerd, apart from live the kind of life she’d wanted when she was twenty-five? She kept coming back to sex. It was reductive and unimaginative, she knew that, but it was also unarguable: Duncan had kept her from having sex with other people, and quite often with him. (They had never been the most highly sexed couple, but whoever kept score of these things would say he’d turned down her overtures more often than she’d turned down his.) How could she make up for fifteen years of missed opportunity, aged thirty-nine? And how much sex was that anyway? Suppose she’d met somebody she loved passionately fifteen years ago, and the relationship had endured? Then it would be fifteen years of sex with Other Man (OM) minus fifteen years of sex with Duncan. To include quality (Q) in the calculation would require a mathematical sophistication that was beyond her capabilities, even though it was probably necessary to give an accurate final figure.
In other words: she wanted to see if anyone would want to have sex with her. Where to start, in Gooleness?
She asked Ros, first of all, on the grounds that Ros was younger, and that younger people were closer to sex than she was.
“I can tell you how to meet gay women in London,” Ros said.
“Right. Thanks. I’m going to aim at straight men in Gooleness first, but I might get back to you if it doesn’t work out.”
“What is it you’re actually after? A one-night stand?”
“Maybe. If it stretched into a second night, I wouldn’t complain. Unless, of course, the first night was horrific. Don’t you know any single men?”
“Ummm . . . no. I’m not sure there are any. Not the kind you’re looking for.”
“What am I looking for?”
“Well, Gooleness has clubs, and lads, and . . . but . . .”
“I know the next four words you’re going to say.”
“What?”
“ ‘With all due respect.’ ”
Ros laughed.
“We could go out,” she said. “If you want.”
“But you’re . . .”
“Gay? Or married?”
“Both.”
“Here’s the thing: I wouldn’t be looking. I’d be helping you to look. We, in the meantime, would be having a night out. And if it looks as though you’re in luck, I will make my excuses and leave. Unless you need me for anything.”
“Don’t be disgusting.”
“Don’t be prudish. Things have changed since you last slept with somebody for the first time. Unless there’s been someone you haven’t told me about.”
“No. Duncan. In 1993.”
“Blimey. You’re in for a shock.”
“That’s what worries me. What sort of shock am I in for?”
“I just imagine a world of pornography and sex toys. And I’m presuming that there is always a minimum of three people involved.”
“Oh, God.”
“And then five minutes after you’ve finished doing it with a minimum of two other people, explicit images of your thirty-nine-year-old body will start appearing on your friends’ mobile phones. And all over the Internet, of course, but that goes without saying.”
“Right. Well. If that’s what you have to do.”
“Ideally, you’d want someone like you, wouldn’t you? I don’t mean, you know, a female museum curator. I mean someone who’s just come out of a long relationship and is similarly perplexed by what happens now.”
“I suppose.”
“Let me think. What are you doing Friday night?”
Annie looked at her.
“Yes. Right. Sorry. Let’s meet in the Rose and Crown at seven, and I’ll bring a plan with me.”
“A sex plan?”
“A sex plan.”
The Rose and Crown, halfway between the museum and the college, was their usual meeting place. It was an unexceptional downtown pub, usually half-full of shop assistants and office workers too intimidated to drink in some of the seaside bars, all of which seemed to employ DJs, even on Sunday at lunchtime. Annie wondered whether there was, anywhere in the country, a DJ wondering how to break into the business. It seemed unlikely, given the number of establishments that seemed to think they needed one. On the contrary, she suspected demand was such that young people had to be coerced into playing music in bars whether they wanted to or not, like a form of national service. Anyway, the Rose and Crown had a jukebox that offered Vince Hill’s version of “Edelweiss,” an offer that was only rarely taken up, in Annie’s experience. It was hard to imagine many sex plans being drawn up in there. And if any were, they would be safe-sex plans, drawn up slowly, and running to several pages of warnings.
Ros bought two half-pints of pale ale and they sat down at the back of the pub, away from a quiet group of fragrant-looking women who appeared as though they were trying to understand the root cause of a particularly bad day’s profits at the Body Shop. Annie realized she was nervous, or excited, or something. Not because she seriously believed that there would be a plan, but because somebody was about to demonstrate interest in how she might spend part of the rest of her life—it had been a very long time since she had provided anyone with anything to talk about. She was somebody’s project. She hadn’t even been her own project for a while.
“There’s a book group,” said Ros. “But not in Gooleness, you know, proper. In a village just outside. You could borrow my car.”
“And there are single men in it?”
“Well, no. Not at the moment. But a friend who belongs feels that if there were any single arts-graduate males in the area, that’s where they’d wash up eventually. There was one a couple of years ago, apparently. Anyway. Just a thought. And the other one I had was that we could go away for the weekend. To Barcelona, maybe. Or Reykjavik, if Iceland still exists.”
“So. Let’s get this straight. The best way to have sex in Gooleness is either to join a book club not actually in the town, with no men in it, or to go to another country.”
“These are just initial ideas. Others will come. And we haven’t even touched on Internet dating. Ah. Look. As if by magic.”
Two men in their early forties had come into the pub. While one was at the bar buying two pints of lager, the other was examining the jukebox. Annie studied him and tried to imagine taking off her clothes for him or with him. Would he even want her to? She had absolutely n
o idea whether she was even passably attractive; she felt as though she hadn’t looked in a mirror for years. She was about to ask Ros (and surely having a lesbian friend would be helpful, or was that not how it worked?) when he started shouting at his friend.
“Gav! Gav!”
The music he’d chosen came on, a bright, fast and tinny soul song that sounded like Tamla Motown but wasn’t.
“Fucking hell!” said Gav. “Go on, Barnesy. Get yourself warmed up.”
“Too much carpet,” said Barnesy, who was small, skinny and muscular, and wearing baggy trousers and a Fred Perry sports shirt. If he were sixteen years old, and she was his teacher, Annie would have had him pegged for the kind of kid who would start a fight with the biggest guy in the class, just to show that he wasn’t scared.
He put down the duffel bag he was carrying anyway, despite the carpet. It clearly wouldn’t take much to push Barnesy over the edge, even though it wasn’t entirely clear what lay beneath.
“Don’t make excuses,” said Gav. “These ladies want to see what you’ve got. Don’t you, ladies?”
“Well,” said Ros. “Some of it.”
That, Annie thought, was the sort of thing she’d have to come up with if she were ever to start picking up men in pubs. It was the speed that intimidated her. It wasn’t as if “Some of it” was a Wildean one-liner, but it did the job, and both men laughed. Annie, meanwhile, was still trying to twist her mouth into a polite smile. It would take her five minutes to complete the smile, and probably another twenty-four hours to produce an accompanying snappy verbal response. Gav and Barnesy would probably have left by then.
What Barnesy had, it turned out, was an extraordinary array of gymnastic dance moves, which he proceeded to demonstrate for the duration of the song. To Annie’s untutored eye, Barnesy was a heady mix of break-dancer, martial-arts warrior and Cossack—there were spins and flailing arms and push-ups and kicks—but it was his complete lack of embarrassment, his absolute confidence that what he was doing was something the half dozen people in the pub would want to see, that was really impressive.