‘You’re about to say something about the house,’ said Nick. ‘I don’t want to talk about the house any more today. Let’s talk about anything else.’
‘OK.’ Gina thought: there were lots of things she wanted to ask Nick. ‘Tell me about your favourite photography assignment. What was the most interesting job you’ve been on?’
‘Ah.’ He smiled. ‘Good question.’
Nick had good stories, and genuine gossip, and he didn’t mind recounting anecdotes in which he was the idiot, the guy who had the wrong lens, the snapper who fell for the wind-up. He reeled off people and places without name-dropping, but Gina noticed that Amanda didn’t seem to feature in any of his stories, except as a reason for him being in a particular place or with certain friends.
The light slowly faded from the room, and the candles burned on the fireplace as they drank the wine and picked at the cheese. Nick asked how Gina’s photographic project was going, and the conversation turned to photographs he wished he’d taken (of his mother, before she died, mainly), then to regrets in general.
‘I try not to believe in regrets,’ he said, topping up their glasses. ‘Or, at least, I only regret things I didn’t do, not things I did.’
‘That’s what all the best fridge magnets say. Fridge magnets never regret anything.’
Nick leaned into the cushions, like a cat stretching. ‘Surely once something’s done, it’s done, and that’s it. You move forward from it, instead of thinking, What if this had happened, or that?’
‘But that’s assuming that what’s happened is all done and dusted. Sometimes the thing you regret changes too much for you to pretend it didn’t happen.’ She stared into her wine. ‘Sometimes it changes who you are. You can’t put that behind you, not without losing a part of yourself.’
He waited for a moment, then asked gently, ‘So what’s your biggest regret, then?’
‘I ruined someone’s life,’ said Gina.
Chapter Nineteen
ITEM: a train ticket, return from Longhampton to Oxford, 1st July 2008
Oxford, July 2008
Gina scans the café and feels nauseous with nerves. Not only does she not know what Kit looks like now, she doesn’t know exactly how disabled he is. Will they have to seat him somewhere specially accessible? Will he be able to feed himself?
Her ignorance shames her. She’s only realising now how much she doesn’t know. Kit gave little away in his email, just agreed a date to meet here in Oxford where he lives. Naomi didn’t want to help her track him down, but unwillingly, after some pleading, she did, finding his address through her brother Shaun.
‘Is this really the right time to get back in touch with Kit?’ She’d gestured despairingly at the pile of appointment letters from the oncology unit on the kitchen table, filed and notated in Stuart’s handwriting. ‘You’ve got enough to think about.’
‘I have to see him now,’ said Gina. ‘I need to sort things out.’
It had seemed so important then, but already Gina can feel this meeting slipping out of her control, away from the brave little speech she’d been running through her head since she’d made the decision to give him back the letters she’s kept for so long.
They’re in her bag, tied with red ribbon. Gina’s been doing a lot of sorting-out lately. These past few nights, in the strange period between her operation and the full-on assault of the chemo starting, she’s been thinking a lot about what would happen to her things if the cancer’s worse than the doctors say. The thought of Stuart finding these letters, or Naomi burning them, makes Gina feel sick.
Kit’s the only person who can decide what to do with them. They’re his.
And, yes, a tiny part of her still wants him to know that she wrote. There’s a younger Gina somewhere, a Gina she left behind, who needs to know that he knows so that part of her life can be tied off.
She spots him sitting by the window, and for a surreal second, Gina’s heart thuds in her chest, still sore from the operation. Kit looks fine – he looks more than fine, he looks almost no different from the way she remembers him. There’s no hideous injury, no supportive chair. He’s wearing a white shirt with a loosened tie, and his blond hair is shorter but still tousled. The same Kit but sharper, more grown-up.
She hurries across the café, weaving through tables, eagerness making her clumsy.This would be ironic, she thinks, bubbling with relief. So Romeo and Juliet. Kit’s actually fine, but they’re meeting again because now she’s the one who’s sick. No, she corrects herself, she’s not sick. She’s in the system. The cancer, and the affected lymph nodes are out. It’s all been caught in time. The chemo will start in four days. She’s going to be fine. Put through the mill, but fine. Don’t think of the alternative.
‘Kit!’ she says breathlessly, then stops, two feet from the table. The dream shatters, the needle screeches off the record.
‘You don’t mind if I don’t get up?’ he asks drily, gesturing to the lightweight wheelchair he’s sitting in. It looks expensive, and high tech, but it’s a wheelchair, nonetheless.
‘No, no, of course not.’
There’s some awkwardness around the kisses.
Oh, God, she thinks, ashamed of herself. How could she have imagined this would be anything other than awkward? They aren’t the same people they were then; they’re like actors out of character, familiar but with wholly unexpected lines coming out of their mouths.
It takes Gina several minutes to stop thinking about Kit’s eerily still body in the hospital bed the last time she saw him. It’s amazing he’s as animated as he is.
She doesn’t remember asking how he is, but he tells her: he’s running a website that co-ordinates holidays for disabled travellers and their carers; he lives just outside Oxford. He’s been all over the world in the past few years because although he’ll never regain use of his legs he doesn’t see that as an obstacle, just a challenge, and, yes, he’s married, of course, with two children, Ben and Amy.
A knife lands in Gina’s chest at the casual mention of his family, his children, but she ploughs on, smiling.
The stranger on the other side of the table with Kit’s voice and Kit’s face makes her wonder, in a dazed, detached way, whether he’s seeing the old her, or the grown-up Gina she’s become. Apart from her wedding ring, she’s no different. She hasn’t done anything, none of the things she’d said she would. Kit has. He’s done more.
Eventually, when Kit’s CV has been thoroughly explored and Gina has pushed a disappointing Caesar salad round her plate, he pauses and looks at her with an expression that she can’t read.
‘So,’ he says, ‘what’s this really about?’
‘I wanted to see you,’ she says.
Kit makes a here-I-am gesture, sweeping invisible crumbs down his front. This new chippiness makes Gina inwardly tearful. It’s not what she remembers, but what right has she to expect that?
‘I wanted to see you because I’ve . . .’ This is the first time she’s had to tell someone outside her immediate family that she has breast cancer. She emailed the HR manager at work about her sick leave. Gina presses her tongue against her teeth to focus herself. ‘I’ve been diagnosed with, um, something pretty serious.’
‘Really? And you thought you’d look me up because I might have some pearls of wisdom for you about hospitals?’
‘No!’
Gina struggles to get her thoughts into a dignified order, but they scatter around her, blowing away.
He hooks an eyebrow, the first trace of the old Kit, but this time he seems angry, not amused. ‘So what do you want me to say? Just because I’m in a wheelchair, it hasn’t turned me into Confucius.’
‘This isn’t easy for me,’ she blurts out, and knows immediately that it was the wrong thing to say. And then, once the floodgates are open, the wrong things start tumbling out. ‘I wanted to say I’m sorry, that I honestly wanted to be there for you. And even if I didn’t understand then, I think I do now and—’
Kit rai
ses his hand, and his eyes are very tired. ‘Gina, you don’t understand. Let me tell you just how much you don’t understand.’
And over the course of thirty agonising minutes, in which Gina is struck completely dumb, he does just that.
It’s only when she’s back on the train, shell-shocked, and reaching into her bag for the last packet of tissues that she realises the letters are still there. She didn’t give Kit the letters.
She’s horrified and relieved in equal measure.
Nick leaned forward and held her foot for a moment, in apology. The intimacy of the gesture stopped her in her tracks. ‘Before you speak, you don’t have to tell me,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, it was an intrusive question.’
Gina swallowed. ‘No, it’s OK.’
He let go and sank back into the cushions, an unhurried expression on his face.
Gina hadn’t told Stuart about the accident for a long time: she was scared he’d see her differently afterwards. He said all the right things, but Gina had always wondered if she’d slipped a bit on the pedestal Stuart liked to keep her on. He was quite black-and-white, especially about drinking. Another reason Janet had loved him so much.
Now, though, it felt different. She wanted to tell Nick: she felt instinctively that his perspectives were different, and he didn’t know her. It seemed more important to be honest with him than to reveal this old self that felt so separate now.
‘When I was twenty-one I was in a car crash,’ she began slowly. ‘It was my fault. My boyfriend was driving my car. It was an old Mini that my stepdad restored for me – it was beautiful, but no airbags.’
‘Ouch,’ said Nick. ‘Was it a write-off?’
‘Complete write-off.’ Gina mimed crumpling up a piece of paper. ‘He took the worst of the impact and ended up in a wheelchair. He still is in a wheelchair. That’s a regret you can’t just leave behind. There isn’t a single day that goes by when I don’t think about it.’
‘But if he was driving, why was it your fault?’
‘Because I was too drunk to drive.’ She stared at the fireplace, feeling the whole story rising in her chest as if it needed to come out of its own accord. ‘I’d been drinking too much anyway. I went through a bit of a party-animal phase at university – I thought it made me look cool. It was the ladette time, you know, Jack Daniel’s for breakfast, cowboy hats. My dad – my biological dad – had been the life and soul of his regiment, by all accounts, so I suppose I thought I was making a connection with him. I didn’t know much else about him.’
Nick said nothing.
‘But I wasn’t really the life and soul. I was shy – everyone else was either much cleverer or much posher than me. Most of the time I sat in my room and panicked about when they’d finally rumble me and come to kick me out. But when I’d had a few jars, I was hilarious. I used to go to gigs all the time, starting off with Jack Daniel’s and Coke in a pint glass. The one thing that stopped me going completely off the rails was my boyfriend, but I only saw him at weekends. He was older than me, already working.’ She paused. It felt weird to introduce the idea of Kit to someone new: he existed so much inside her head. ‘He was called Kit. Short for Christopher.’
‘How did you meet him?’
‘I met him at a gig in Oxford while I was still at school. It was the real thing, for both of us. He used to come and see me at weekends, or I’d go to London to be with him. I know those sorts of relationships don’t often work out, but it worked for us.’
Nick tilted his head, assessing. ‘Must have been pretty serious, then.’
She smiled, knowing what it must sound like. ‘I know everyone thinks their first love is amazing but Kit and I were one of those irritating inseparable couples. Soulmates. I felt like I’d come home when I was with him. His family were all creative – they had a beautiful house in Oxford, like something from one of those Richard Curtis films where Mum’s an artist and Dad’s a famous academic . . .’ Gina’s eyes travelled around the panelling, shadowy and flickering in the candlelight. ‘I suppose this house reminds me a bit of theirs.’
She’d never made that connection before. This was the house she and Kit would have had, if the version of her life in which she married him and had several blond and angelic children had happened. Not her and Stuart at all.
‘I bet it wasn’t like this house,’ said Nick. ‘This house is falling to pieces, and will soon be a residential retreat for business types doing team building on the croquet lawn.’
Gina levered herself up on her elbow. ‘What?’
He flapped a hand at her. ‘Forget it, I didn’t mean to interrupt. Carry on.’
She sank back. ‘I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’
‘Because I asked. And I’m interested. Go on. You were telling me why you think this accident was somehow your fault.’
Gina closed her eyes. ‘Because I should have been responsible. I put everyone in a shit position. My stepdad had had a heart attack and he was rushed to hospital. Mum fell to pieces. She needed me there. I was supposed to go straight away, but I’d just got back from a garden party and I was hammered. I’d been drinking Pimm’s from a bucket with a straw. Kit said he’d drive me.’
‘Was there something wrong with the car?’
‘No.’
‘Did you distract him while he was driving?’
‘Not really. I mean, I don’t know, I was probably a bit hysterical. Terry was one of those people I thought would just live for ever, you know. I didn’t realise how much I loved him until . . . until it looked like I was going to miss saying goodbye.’ She blinked. ‘And I did miss him in the end. That’s a regret.’
‘But it was an accident? What happened?’
She turned her head away. That was what had tormented her for years: she didn’t know. ‘I’ve got no memory of it. I remember leaving the place where the car was parked, but that’s it. I was in hospital for a few days under observation but I got away with a broken collarbone, whiplash, concussion and some scratches. Kit didn’t. He was in intensive care for weeks.’
Nick let out a long breath but didn’t speak, leaving space for Gina’s words to spill out into the sympathetic silence.
‘So, basically, in the absence of any other evidence, it was my fault. If Kit hadn’t got into that car, he wouldn’t have had the accident, he wouldn’t have wound up paralysed and he’d have had the amazing career he was supposed to have. But he didn’t because of me.’
‘Not because of you,’ said Nick, quietly. ‘He survived, though?’
‘Yes. I wasn’t allowed to see him. I wrote to him after the accident but his mother sent every single one of my letters back.’
‘Why?’
‘She didn’t think I was strong enough to deal with the future he had. So I wrote for such a long time to prove to her that I was, and she just kept sending them back. Then when I had my cancer diagnosis, and I thought I was going to die, I tracked him down and took the letters to give back to him in person.’ Gina ran a hand through her hair. It was weird explaining this to someone who didn’t know her and Kit, and their story. It sounded . . . a bit melodramatic, frankly. ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. Well, you don’t, when you first hear you’ve got cancer. I had this feeling Kit and I had reached a sort of karmic balance – I’d got my comeuppance for the accident now.’
‘Whoa. And?’
‘Well. It didn’t go the way I’d thought it would.’ Gina’s cheeks felt hot. ‘He told me that I should come back when I’d actually had some treatment and understood what I was talking about.’
‘Harsh,’ said Nick.
‘Well, looking back, he was probably right. I thought I understood, but in a way the treatment isn’t the hardest part to get your head round. It’s how you feel the day after the last session. When they’re done with you, and you’re on your own. No more specialists or experts to ask. Just you, but you’re not the same person you were before. That’s the hard part. It’s over five years since my last treatment but every
morning when I take my Tamoxifen, it reminds me that I’m not the same person I was before.’ Gina stared at the fireplace, barely aware that she was talking. ‘It’s funny, isn’t it? Some things just change you outright. It’s not like a slow evolution, it’s like . . .’ She snapped her fingers, unable to find the right words. ‘The second I woke up in hospital after the accident, I knew the life I’d had before had gone, but I was desperate to hold on to it. I suppose that was why I kept writing to Kit. I wanted to keep it alive. Same with the cancer, same with the divorce. You look back and it’s definitely you in all the photos, but it’s not you. It all feels fake. You have to keep starting again.’
‘Is that such a bad thing?’
She sighed. ‘I don’t know. There’s less and less time left to get it right.’
The words hung in the air between them, spreading like ink in a glass of water, colouring the atmosphere a darker shade. Gina didn’t feel she had to explain more: the expression in Nick’s eyes was sympathetic and sad.
‘You never felt like going back after your chemo and telling Kit how rude he’d been?’
Had Kit been rude? He’d had reason to be.
‘There didn’t seem much point. And, to be honest, I was a bit crushed by the whole experience.’ Gina was glad Nick couldn’t see her face: her eyes were filling with tears. ‘What made it worse was that while I’d been pissing about in dead-end relationships, working for the council, he’d set up his own travel company for disabled people and got married and been named Oxfordshire Business Achiever of the Year. He’d actually managed to do more with his life despite being in a wheelchair than I had in more or less perfect health. Something he was kind enough to point out to me. I mean, it’s better in a way, that I didn’t ruin his life but . . .’
Nick laughed out loud. ‘He sounds a peach, this guy. That can’t have helped your state of mind, days before your treatment for cancer.’
‘No. It didn’t.’ She managed a smile. That had been what Naomi had said. What an arse.