The second verse is the only part of the song that expresses unalloyed affection for another, the sentiment I had expected Charlie to opt for. He sang an alternative version. The knight who had saved all his ribbons for his loved one was replaced by an accusation, an excuse and an ugly image: of the singer being twisted by their love.
I glanced at Angelina. Her expression was blank, closed. In the time we had spent together as lovers, I had never seen her look that way—and I was glad I hadn’t.
When Charlie finished singing about the pretty woman who had tempted him, about swearing to make up for it, he added another verse, one that I didn’t know:
Don’t cry, don’t cry any more, I’ve paid for it.
So Charlie had had an affair. Angelina had a better reason than turning forty-five or Charlie’s heart problem—or me—for wanting to leave her twenty-year marriage. And she had not told me.
Christ—maybe she didn’t know. Or not until now. Was Charlie, at the end of the week, saying: There’s this one extra thing that may affect your decision? Only after Angelina had passed the point of no return.
Whatever the truth, Charlie had had the last word. I was beginning to wonder if the week had ever been about Angelina and me.
Then Angelina said to me, ‘Do you know “Angel of the Morning”?’
She had positioned herself between the piano and Charlie, and we were lined up as we were on that July evening in 1989, with Charlie in the place of Richard.
This would be our last song together. I took it up a semitone to A Sharp.
Angelina sang, in a voice given timbre by time, but still with the purity that you don’t hear in speech:
There’ll be no strings to bind your hands.
I did not look to see Charlie’s expression, because in my mind I was living that exact moment again.
Play another chord and I’ll break your arms.
I played the F.
Not if my love can’t bind your heart.
The first time, she had surely sung it for Richard. The second for me. Now?
Angelina put her hand on my shoulder, pressing with the beat. Was she thinking of the Barrett Browning sonnet, too?
I picked up the music, and we played and sang like it was 1989. Angelina was gripping my shoulder so tightly I could barely go on as she asked someone, one of us, to slowly turn away from her.
It was late. The fire had gone out. Charlie had not touched his harmonicas. No one spoke.
I didn’t need to say that I would not be claiming my trivia prize.
Angelina, tears running down her face, turned to me, kissed me gently, and, in front of her husband, said the words she had said to me fifty times before, long ago and far away.
‘Goodnight, Dooglas.’
37
Charlie strode up the stairs ahead of Angelina. It was an unfortunate slip of the tongue, but he seemed to have an unlimited capacity to forgive. Had it always been that way or only since he had needed Angelina to reciprocate?
I made it to my room before the familiar emptiness hit me: the feeling I’d had in the morning when I realised it wasn’t going to happen; the way I’d felt as I walked to the plane in 1989; the phone call earlier that year—‘You’re Alfred Sharp’s son?’ No tears, no feelings, just emptiness. Drained. Hollowed out. Gutted.
It was late, I’d been drinking for hours and had hardly slept the night before, but sleep was not going to come. If I didn’t do something my mind would start churning over the decision I’d taken—we’d taken—reviewing it in the light of what I had just learned, re-assessing it in the face of Angelina’s tears. We had come so close to waking up together every morning for the rest of our lives. Only a day ago, I had held it, believed in it. And now: nothing.
I put my earphones in but could not think of anything I wanted to listen to. I hit the Random button and an unfamiliar song began, probably from one of Stuart’s CDs. Piano chords, slow, melancholy lyrics about having nowhere to go. Not what I needed. I was about to skip to the next track when the drums came in.
I lay back, volume up, listening to anthemic rock, cherry-picking the lyrics that connected—hold on if you can—giving myself up to the music the way Claire used to. The three-minute rush that is a great rock song did its magic, and the emptiness began to give way to love and pain and even a little optimism, the energy to go on. Whatever I had lost, there was still music. I was a mess, but it was better than nothingness.
Back in the day, safecrackers used to sandpaper their fingertips to make them more sensitive. That’s how I felt when the song ended: raw, exposed and vulnerable. Alive. If I walked outside I would feel the grass and the rain with new skin. I wanted to hold onto this, to take it home with me.
And I was ready to go home.
I logged on to the SNCF railway website and booked an early-morning ticket to London.
I woke to the alarm, called the local taxi company, and padded upstairs for a shower and a sober review of the previous evening.
Charlie’s motivation—or his primary motivation—was now clear. ‘Okay, I bonked the intern or the housekeeper or your best friend; now you can have one in return and we’ll be even. And you won’t be able to take the high moral ground anymore.’
Of all the men in the world that Angelina could have a free pass with, she chose me. I would have chosen her.
The factor none of us had considered was that Angelina and I would fall in love again—or, at least, fall back into the love we once had.
Showered and dressed, I knocked lightly on their bedroom door, and pushed it open. I could hardly leave without saying goodbye to Angelina.
Charlie was out to it, snoring. Angelina’s side of the bed was empty.
There were two other bedrooms upstairs, and I found her in the one that doubled as her wardrobe, sprawled on top of the covers in her blue nightdress. I touched her shoulder and she stirred, but it took a cupped hand to the side of her face to wake her.
‘Adam?’
‘Are you okay?’ She looked wrecked.
‘What time is it?’
‘6.45. I’m on the 8.30 train.’
‘Oh shit. I’ve hardly slept.’
‘The Douglas thing?’
‘We had a fight. Another fight.’ She lay back and looked at the ceiling. ‘I’m so over it.’ She reached up and pulled me down towards her. ‘I don’t want you to go.’
I didn’t want to go either, at that moment, with no thought of the consequences. But we had done the hard yards the previous day and I did not want to walk them again. This was hurting us both for no good purpose.
‘You’re going to sort it out. We talked about this. I’ve got a taxi booked.’
‘Cancel it. I’ll take you to the station.’
She got to her feet, grabbed underwear, jeans and a sweater from a chest of drawers, then pulled the blue nightdress over her head, looking right at me.
‘You’ve got time for a shower, if you want,’ I said. ‘I’ll make you a coffee.’
I went downstairs and turned on the espresso machine.
What we needed right now was a psychologist. Or maybe we only needed Mandy and her Kübler-Ross grief model. Angelina had got stuck in Denial with Richard, but this time she seemed to have moved on to Bargaining. Or would it be: Angelina’s psychological type is compelling her to make a decision—an emotional decision—and you guys keep changing the parameters.
My mother would have had none of this mumbo jumbo. I could see her looking down at Angelina on the bed. For goodness’ sake, how old are you? Go back to your husband and sort it out before he throws you out on the street where you belong.
Angelina joined me in the kitchen, looking more composed but fragile.
‘I’m sorry. I was upset. I know we talked about it. But there are things I couldn’t tell you that make a difference. You need to know—’
‘Charlie had an affair?’
That stopped her.
‘Did I talk in my sleep? He told you? My God, he told yo
u.’
‘When did it happen? Before or after the heart attack?’
‘After. With one of the women at work.’
Right on both counts. Men are pathetic.
‘An affair or just a bonk?’
She managed a laugh at the word from the past. ‘Charlie would say just a bonk, but I don’t think she would have. It wasn’t only once. She was twenty-nine. Twenty-nine.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘I know him. I asked and he fessed up.’
If Charlie had listened to that Lenny Bruce performance, he would have known: never confess. So much for the world-class negotiator. Didn’t he remember what Richard had done to her?
‘So…’
‘I was pretty hurt. I wanted to leave him, and I told myself that he was right: we shouldn’t throw away all the good things et cetera, et cetera, et-fucking-cetera. But I wasn’t nice about it. I made it difficult for him. I made him fire the little bitch.’
‘I’d have thought that would be pretty hard to do. You can’t fire people for screwing a colleague.’
‘Really? I must tell the guys at work. I’m a fucking Equal Opportunity Commissioner. I told you I made it difficult for him. But I didn’t want her around. She didn’t get fired, technically. She got a fat cheque and a new job. For almost wrecking a marriage.’
‘And you haven’t forgiven him?’ Because you can give up your career for your wife, buy her a ring every birthday, adopt her sister’s child, but screw one sheep…
‘I know if he could take it back, he would. It was half my fault. After the heart attack, I didn’t want to have sex. I was afraid he’d die.’
‘You ever cheat on him? Ever?’
‘Never,’ said the woman to her lover. ‘But I guess we’re even now.’
‘Is that what this is all about?’ I said.
‘It’s part of it. Not all. It could only have been you. I wanted to tell you about it, but he made me swear not to tell anyone. Otherwise, he’d leave me. He’d leave me. He’s been screwing some kid and I’m trying to hold it together for the sake of our marriage and he’s the one giving me ultimatums.’
‘You’re still angry.’
‘Not so angry I can’t think. I kept my promise, my promise to you yesterday, but if he’s told you…I can’t believe he told you…then you understand. Yesterday I told him I forgave him. And I meant it. I had to make myself mean it. That’s what I had to do for our marriage to survive.’
Of course. Charlie had not been hanging out for Angelina to renounce me, but to forgive him. Had saying the words convinced her that she could never really do so?
‘I don’t believe you want to lose Charlie.’ I would not have believed Mandy wanted to lose Randall, either. Plenty of men think that other men should be forgiven the occasional slip-up.
I looked at my watch.
‘You really want to go?’ she said.
‘I have to.’
Did she realise how close I was to giving in to my emotions and Bob from Idaho, both screaming at me: Take her, take the chance?
Charlie had extracted a promise of silence on the infidelity; he had got forgiveness; now he apparently wanted an apology for the Douglas fiasco of twenty years ago. Why should I have to play God and decide that their wounded marriage was worth more than a chance of us being together? Why should I override Angelina’s adult decision?
Because I knew Angelina. I knew that instinct would drive her to the dramatic decision, to singing ‘I Will Survive’ and walking away. Even against her own best interests. Which made her no different from Mandy or a million other betrayed spouses. What would her best friend say? Probably tell her to walk. But she had known all this yesterday and had made a choice.
We hardly spoke in the car.
On the platform, she put her arms around me as the train pulled in.
‘I asked you something yesterday,’ she said. ‘Do you remember?’
‘We said a lot of things yesterday,’ I said. ‘It was a big day.’
‘It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing else we can say, is there?’
‘No.’
We’d had our chance. I hoped no song would ever recreate what I was feeling at that moment.
38
On the train to Paris, I waited for the ache of the farewell to subside and be replaced by some sort of relief at closure.
The week had woken something in me, but it had come with a hard lesson. There was a place for lost love, and it was not in a French farmhouse with a married couple struggling to get through a crisis. Lost love belongs in a three-minute song, pulling back feelings from a time when they came unbidden, recalling the infatuation, the walking on sunshine that cannot last and the pain of its loss, whether through parting or the passage of time, reminding us that we are emotional beings.
The countryside and villages rushed past, we pulled into Paris and I changed trains, but the ache did not go away. Instead I felt unsettled. Something didn’t fit: the feeling, as I held Angelina on the platform, that she was still hoping I might change my mind.
I did not believe she loved me as much as she loved Charlie. Twenty years ago, maybe. But not now, even after his affair. My sense of unease began to turn into a conviction that she was not going back to Charlie at all, that the Douglas fight had been terminal. She would not have told me, because that would be acknowledging that I was second choice.
A line from the Killers’ song I had played in my room the previous night, about shining in the hearts of others, was running around in my head, trying to reassure me that after all these things I had done I could hold my head up.
At the Gare du Nord, waiting for the Eurostar to leave, I found myself thinking about Claire. I would have only myself to blame if the next time I heard a sad song I was transported to a moment with her that I had failed to appreciate. Or to one that I had appreciated: the evening at the Buddha Bar after the lotto debacle, when she had somehow understood that the biggest threat to our relationship was not her own anger but my shame—that I was ready to leave so as not to have to face her again.
The penny dropped.
I was on the train. I had transited Paris, bypassed the baby grand in the waiting area, checked in, queued for security, formally exited France, cleared UK immigration, shuffled with the crowd onto the platform, boarded the train and found a place for my bag. I was as good as home. I had only one question to answer: how much did I love Angelina?
I had likened the day that Angelina reconnected with me to my father turning over a 45 of the Beatles’ ‘Hey Jude’ to play the flip side, with the simple clarity of the piano giving way to the fuzz and confusion and excitement of electric guitars. Ask anyone about ‘Revolution’ and that’s what they’ll remember—the guitars. But listen to it again and you’ll hear the electric piano of Nicky Hopkins, the ring-in, low in the mix for a while, but in the end resurgent, bringing it home.
I raced back through immigration, officially re-entered France, crossed Paris to the Gare de Lyon and bought a ticket on the TGV to Macon, back to where I had come from.
I had an hour and forty-five minutes on the train to think. It was long enough to work out what had been going on, or near enough. The key to negotiation, as the man at the centre of it all said, is to know the other party’s goals.
I had known the first of Charlie’s goals within minutes of meeting him. He needed to be liked. By everyone, even me. He also wanted to keep his marriage, but I had relied too much on that goal. Now I knew another, perhaps related to the first: he needed to escape his shame.
Charlie’s marriage, his persona, had been built on his worshipping Angelina, and she in turn idolising him for that. He had slipped up in the worst possible way. My guilt about losing twenty thousand pounds to a bad investment must have been nothing to what Charlie felt when Angelina looked at him.
The week now made more sense. Charlie had acceded to us being together, knowing that his affair had made Angelina vulnerable. She didn’t have Claire’s supe
rhuman capacity to put her emotions aside and make the right call for everyone. Then, after trying to bring Angelina down to his level, pushing her as far as she could be pushed, he had found his shame was still there and had then done everything to make Angelina leave—including encouraging her back-up option. Without ever dropping the good-guy persona.
All of the above.
He wanted his marriage to survive. But only if he could get past the shame. And no forgiveness, no matter how complete, could do that for him.
What about Angelina? She knew Charlie. She knew what was going on. She had tried to put aside her own anger to rebuild his ego. His ego. All those stories about what a hero he was. She had bought into his game of bringing her down. Then she had taken the huge step of forgiving him.
But before she had had a chance to recover from the emotional toll of doing that, Charlie had asked her, through the Smoke Till You’re Sick singalong, to violate her memories. And finally the insult of the Gilbert and Sullivan bet.
Maybe Angelina’s forgiveness was a two-edged sword: in the act of forgiving him, she was showing herself to be a better person. What Angelina did in an attempt to get the marriage back together could not be equated with Charlie’s self-serving fling. Charlie may not have processed this—just realised he could not win and lashed out.
Whatever the reason, Angelina had lashed back. Your father may have died with no regrets, but will you?
That would have done it. It cut to the core of his problem. Charlie had an even bigger need to be liked—admired—than I did. His only option was escape. Angelina knew it.
Dooglas gave him a final, wretched chance to seize the high moral ground on his way out.
Which left the third party. I was supposed to be the catalyst who would, by sleeping with Angelina, square the ledger and serve as a peace offering—a gift—from Charlie, in line with tradition. And walk away unchanged.
Angelina and I were never meant to fall in love again. But I had been primed to do so from the moment I decided to leave Claire. In the face of Angelina’s crumbling marriage, and the convoluted games it had descended to, our shared memories and the support I had offered must have seemed like a breath of fresh air—and a way out.