‘I imagined you’d slept with Randall.’
‘Before or after he was with Mandy?’
‘After. What are you saying?’
‘Neither. But he did try. Before I met you. I introduced him to Mandy instead. He never mentioned it to you?’
How many secrets were out there? How many of our friends had had one-night stands, affairs, lost loves that they never confessed?
‘Whatever it is, you really don’t need to tell me,’ I said. ‘Unless you want to get it off your chest or it’s somehow relevant now.’
‘Both,’ she said. ‘I had a fertility test. Back when I was trying to get pregnant. I just wanted to know. And it was me. My tubes were blocked. They could have tried to do something about it, but it would have been difficult and I just didn’t want to do it. I didn’t want to tell you that, in the end, I was the one choosing not to have children. Maybe you’d have left me to have children with someone else. And now…you need to know it wasn’t you, in case…I’m so sorry.’
She was crying, crying over something that had happened maybe fifteen years ago, over the whole screw-up that was us and children: getting over my own fears, persuading her to try, failing and never properly finding our way back to a vision of a relationship for the two of us.
I stood and put my arms around her, as she sat on the stool, and she put hers around me.
‘You should have told me ages ago,’ I said. ‘We’d agreed we weren’t going to do IVF or anything, anyway. I wasn’t going to leave you, and I don’t want to now.’
‘Adam, I can’t—’
‘I knew. I did it, too. Got tested. Same reason. Just wanted to know. If it had been me, maybe we could have done something straightforward to sort it.’
‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘So you wouldn’t feel the way you did.’
Claire let go and I stepped back, making space. ‘God, we were idiots,’ she said. ‘It’s taken this to get us to say what we should have said…’
‘So where does that leave us?’
She got a tissue from the bench and wiped her face. There was no anger or malice in her expression, just sadness.
‘I think it leaves us with a better understanding of what happened. I’m sorry to put it like this, but nothing’s changed from what we said a week ago. It’s not about anyone else, it’s about me moving. About that being more important to both of us than our relationship.’
‘I said I’d make you coffee every morning. I suppose if you’re in the States I’ll have to go there to do it.’
She stared at me. She did know me, and she had not expected this.
I picked up the coffee mug. ‘Get the best deal you can and I’ll fit in. If you want me to.’
‘You hate America.’
‘I love you.’
She looked and looked and looked. It wasn’t the I love you. It was the willingness to move, which in the last few hours had changed in my mind from a deal-breaker to no big deal. If we were going to undo the deadlock, one of us had to step up—simple logic that would have changed my life twenty-two years earlier.
‘You want to go back to what we had?’ said Claire.
‘It suited both of us, didn’t it?’
‘Must have. Why would two smart people like us have set it up any way except the way we wanted? Maybe we both thought there were more important things than our relationship.’
‘I may have changed,’ I said.
I was conscious that my desire to reboot our relationship arose only partly from reaching a resolution about Angelina. I wanted us to have some of what Angelina and Charlie had, despite the fact that what they had was co-dependent, perhaps pathological and, until a few hours ago, terminal. It seemed worth it for the good bits.
‘I have to say, the coffee in bed is a persuasive argument,’ said Claire.
‘Dinner out together once a week,’ I said. ‘I’ll cook all the time. And work most of the time. And we should go to France. Before we go to America.’
I was starting to paint a picture that I liked. We could skip the foie gras.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘But two more things.’
‘Two?’
‘Two.’ She stood up and I followed her to the sitting room, bringing the bottle with me. She waited until I had topped up both glasses and taken a seat on the sofa opposite her.
‘If you’re not really over…Angelina, I need to know. And we’ll work it through to whatever the ending is. Like we should have done last time.’
‘I got over it last time. It was just nostalgia until we got in touch again. And for a little while I thought I could turn back time.’
‘It must have been a big week. I don’t know what happened, or how much you’re planning to tell me, but if you need to, let’s do it now. I don’t want it drip-fed to me over the next twenty years.’
‘If I need to? What about you?’
‘You know something: I used to believe that couples should share everything, no secrets, but you get older. When I look at Mandy and what she’s gone through, I wish Randall hadn’t been such a coward and had just lived with it. Or maybe confided in you or a counsellor or someone who’d never tell Mandy. If he hadn’t dumped it on her…’
‘You don’t want to know?’
‘Not for me. I don’t need any more detail. Stories about people I’ve never met that I’m sure they’d rather I didn’t know. But if it’s important for you to share it…’
‘If I need to, I’ll pay for a therapist. Not Randall’s.’
‘If it makes you feel any better, I’m assuming you slept with her. I’m not going to base the rest of my life on it.’ She looked away for a few moments, then looked back. ‘Or anything you might have said to her. I’m not Mandy. Second thing, then.’
She walked to the piano and lifted the lid.
‘You can sing for your supper. Every night. Keep your promise to your dad.’
Easy. No. This was a big deal. In fact, it was a huge deal. I had avoided playing with Claire in the house. The emotional nexus between me, music and a woman had, for at least the last few years, belonged to the Angelina relationship. Claire must have guessed this. Or maybe she just wanted me to deliver on my emotional-sidekick responsibilities.
I had begun to think of how to overcome my resistance, when I realised it wasn’t there. I wanted to play. Maybe that would be the legacy of the last few months.
I walked to the piano and, as I had done a day ago and a world away, I let my unconscious mind choose the song, just as you start walking without thinking about putting one foot in front of the other.
I played a chord, an F sharp, three fingers across the black keys, and the opening line of a Tom Waits song filled my head.
I played it: ‘San Diego Serenade’, a simple melody, a three-verse litany of loss, about not knowing what you have until it’s gone. Just my middle-aged voice and my dad’s piano. I wasn’t playing the song for Claire or for Angelina; I wasn’t directing the words at anyone. I was just playing music that allowed me to be an emotional being and let Claire join me in that place.
It was nearly two in the morning.
‘Thank God I don’t need to get to London till tomorrow afternoon,’ Claire said.
Ah. Charlie had a 2 p.m. flight to Milan. I explained about his offer and she texted her partners.
‘We’d better go to bed, then,’ she said. ‘In our room. That’s a third thing. You’re never sleeping in Alison’s room again. America or not, we’re selling the house.’
Then she kissed me and, despite being forty-nine and half-drunk and having made love to another woman all week, I felt a distinct reaction.
‘We missed Friday,’ I said.
‘Don’t even think about it,’ said Claire.
It was an unexceptional way to end the most tumultuous week of my life.
Charlie would stay on until the Tuesday and guide Claire’s team to a deal far beyond their expectations, giving himself another story to tell. Her commitment to move to San Jo
se for three years would be backed by a similar commitment to her software baby and a salary that I would not be able to match if I worked eight days a week.
Claire would return from London singing Charlie’s praises as both a negotiator and a charmer who had flirted outrageously with her. And with some questions about a futures-trading debacle she had never heard of. She would tell me that Charlie had cancelled his visit to Milan because his daughter did not want to see him.
In California, I would meet up again with Randall, who would find me a job, after I’d given him a bollocking for hitting on Claire a quarter of a century earlier.
I would play piano in a bar, three nights a week, and find myself working hard to expand my repertoire to include songs from the last thirty years. There would be no space in my life for regular trivia nights, and no time or reason to sit in a room with a playlist of heartache. At the piano, I would be too busy getting a new song down to let the lyrics pull me into nostalgia.
One night, a guy who looked a lot like Jackson Browne would walk into the bar and take a seat in the back corner. I would play ‘The Pretender’ and he would applaud enthusiastically and walk towards the piano. I would decide that if he wanted to play I would let him. He would continue past me to the bathroom, but I would be pretty sure it was him.
I would finally and clumsily thank my mother for doing the hard yards while I idolised my absent father.
Claire and I would agree to a regular date night, and talk about what was happening in our busy lives and sometimes what was going on in our heads. Afterwards, I would play piano and we would share a connection that neither of us felt comfortable putting into words. Without fuss, but to mark a commitment to growing old together, we would get married.
Four years after moving to San Jose I would receive an email from Samantha Acheson, beginning with the words I understand you knew my mother, who passed away, and there would be tears running down my face before I realised she was referring to Jacinta. She was collecting memories from people who had known her, and I duly wrote an affectionate and nostalgic two pages of reminiscences. Samantha added that her parents were well and still drinking too much.
I would never see Angelina again. I would remember her—not the twenty-three-year-old, but the woman I spent a week with in France—when I heard a song of lost love, and it would be all the more poignant because at the Macon railway station I was only a semiquaver away from asking her to come with me.
For those times, I had another Jackson Browne song of love revisited, with a line about laughing in pleasure’s ruins. I would play it in my head or on my phone, and remember the night that our rekindled passion left a bedside cabinet on its side and Charlie’s iPod looking up at us. But it was the sentiment of the closing lines that would carry me through my sixth decade: was it the past or the future calling?
And, as far as anyone can know for certain in a world where a one-word email or a slip of the tongue in a French farmhouse or a cosmic ghost flipping the record over can change everything in an instant, it was going to be all right.
Playlist
These are the versions that I had in mind when writing. See textpublishing.com.au/books/the-best-of-adam-sharp for a Spotify playlist.
Hey Jude (The Beatles)
Like a Rolling Stone (Bob Dylan) —the ‘Judas’ moment is on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 4: Bob Dylan Live 1966: The ‘Royal Albert Hall’ Concert
Someone Like You (Adele)
My Sentimental Friend (Herman’s Hermits) —a taste of Adam’s accent
Walk Away Renée (The Left Banke / The Four Tops, or, for a spare version such as Pete the Project Manager sings, Linda Ronstadt)
Brown Eyed Girl (Van Morrison)
Because the Night (The Patti Smith Group) —Adam is wrong: Bruce Springsteen did record a studio version, eventually released on The Promise in 2010
Both Sides Now (Joni Mitchell / Judy Collins)
You’re Going to Lose that Girl (The Beatles)
You Are So Beautiful (Joe Cocker)
You Can Leave Your Hat On (Joe Cocker)
I Hope that I Don’t Fall in Love with You (Tom Waits)
If You Gotta Go, Go Now (Bob Dylan / Manfred Mann) — Dylan’s acoustic version on The Bootleg Series, Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964: Concert at Philharmonic Hall is closest to how Adam plays it
I’m Henry VIII, I Am (Herman’s Hermits) —an overdose of Adam’s accent, in the same vein as their ‘Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter’
Greensleeves (Loreena McKennitt)
I Am Woman (Helen Reddy)
Early in the Morning (The Mojos) —the all-female Australian blues combo
Walking on Sunshine (Katrina and the Waves)
Mr. Siegal (Tom Waits)
Imagine (John Lennon)
Angel of the Morning (Merrilee Rush and the Turnabouts / Juice Newton) —growing up in New Zealand, I first heard Allison Durbin’s version
I Will Survive (Gloria Gaynor)
Great Balls of Fire (Jerry Lee Lewis)
Skyline Pigeon (Elton John)
Walking in Memphis (Cher)
Walk Out in the Rain (Ann Christy)
Against the Wind (Bob Seger)
Clair (Gilbert O’Sullivan)
Goodnight Irene (Ry Cooder) —his version features an accordion
Angelina (Bob Dylan)
Lola (The Kinks)
For Once in My Life (Stevie Wonder)
C Jam Blues (Oscar Peterson)
Champagne Charlie (Leon Redbone)
Summertime (Billie Holiday / Janis Joplin)
Angie (The Rolling Stones)
Chopin: Étude Op. 10, No. 3 in E major, Tristesse (Vladimir Ashkenazy)
Farther On (Jackson Browne)
The Ship Song (Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds)
Angel (Sarah McLachlan)
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien / No Regrets (Edith Piaf)
Bird on the Wire (Leonard Cohen) —the performance on Cohen Live: Leonard Cohen in Concert, 1994
All These Things that I’ve Done (The Killers)
San Diego Serenade (Tom Waits)
The Pretender (Jackson Browne)
The Times You’ve Come (Jackson Browne)
Revolution (The Beatles)
Acknowledgments
This book would not have been written, and nor would I be a writer at all, without the support of my wife, Anne Buist, who again provided inspiration, encouragement and a critical eye.
Special thanks are due to Orest Bilas (late of Manchester) and Piano Man Pete Walsh.
My editors, Michael Heyward, Rebecca Starford and David Winter at Text Publishing, helped me take the manuscript a long way from the draft I wrote between the Rosie novels.
My early readers were there before and during the formal editing process, and made innumerable valuable suggestions: Jon Backhouse, Tania Chandler, Eamonn Cooke, Judy Della-Vecchia, Robert Eames, Irina Goundortseva, Toni Jordan, Rod Miller, Helen O’Connell, Susannah Petty, Daniel Simsion, Dominique Simsion, Chris and Sue Waddell, Pete and Geri Walsh, and Janifer Willis.
My international publishers—Cordelia Borchardt (Fischer, Germany), Jennifer Enderlin (St Martin’s Press, US), Maxine Hitchcock (Penguin, UK) and Jennifer Lambert (HarperCollins, Canada)—also provided helpful input.
Thanks also to Robin Baker, Peter Dawson, Susan and Martin Gandar, Emma Healey and Andrew McKechnie, David Hay, Kim Krejus, Sarah Lutyens, Karyn Marcus, Steve Mitchell and Susan Sly.
Finally, I want to acknowledge the continuing contribution of the team at Text Publishing—in particular Anne Beilby, Alice Cottrell, Jane Novak and Kirsty Wilson—and my publishers and agents around the world who have done so much to bring my books to readers and to enable me to continue working as a writer.
Graeme Simsion, The Best of Adam Sharp
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