— Oh, those are what I need, she says. — On a bad day, I could stare at the furniture in our spare room and take comfort from it.
— It’s not exactly building a new world, though, is it? Bedroom, bathroom, hallway, kitchen…
— Who wants a new world?
Night falls while we are eating and the darkness outside presses greedily against the glass; an autumn moon swims up over the water, dowager-stately, trailing clouds like scarves, looming over its own reflection. The restaurant by this time is crowded and noisy. Somehow we get on to talking about coincidence: Madeleine believes in premonitions and synchronicity and ghosts and we quarrel about this amiably enough, not for the first time. She gives me examples of things that have happened to her which can’t have been accidental and I insist that this perception is only confirmation bias. She says there are patterns of energy we can tap into, if we allow ourselves to read the signs. We’re neither of us going to change our minds. I tell her how I’ve dreamed often about Fred since he died, but I don’t think that’s because he’s visiting me or sending me messages, it’s just because I miss him and feel sad about him. (One of these dreams was so horrible that I can’t recount it to Madeleine or to anyone, it’s safer if I keep it to myself. In this dream Fred came to stay with us and was just the same funny, exuberant, glum self that he had been when he was alive, except that he brought his dead body with him as if that was a normal thing to do, and kept leaving it carelessly lying about the place; this body was a disgusting thing, half opened up like a body in an autopsy. I was terrified all the time that the boys or Ester would come across it and be traumatised — often in my dreams the boys aren’t the grown men they are in real life, they’re still children and I’m still responsible for them.)
I’m happy in the restaurant with Madeleine. We’re genuinely hungry and everything tastes good and I like the way the night beyond the glass closes us in with the crowd of strangers also enjoying themselves. There’s a kind of freedom too, no doubt about it, in our being fifty. It’s painful and terrible that youth is over, and with it that whole game of looking and longing and vying for attention, hoping for something, for some absolute transformation of everything. But it’s also a reprieve to be let off that hook and know that you’re simply in your own hands at last. Although Madeleine insists at one point that some man or other is eyeing me up; I don’t really think he is, and I don’t fancy him in any case. Anyway, I say, I’m old enough to be his mother. Madeleine says that as I was a child bride I could be anybody’s mother, and I remind her that the one thing I wasn’t as a child was anyone’s bride. And then she breaks off and gives me an odd kind of glance as if that’s reminded her of something she ought to tell me, but doesn’t want to. It takes a bit of coaxing to get it out of her, but she’s hopeless at dissimulating and explains to me eventually that she’s heard news from her mother (who still lives in the house where Madeleine grew up, next door to me) that Valentine has come home.
Valentine! No! I’m surprised by how the news disturbs me, after all this time.
— Do you mean home from the States?
— I mean home to his old house, where he lived when we knew him. His mother’s still there; he’s staying with her, apparently. He’s been there for months. Mum says he’s ill. Or he’s been ill and he’s come home to get better, I’m not sure which. His mother must be a hundred and ten by now. She was ancient when we were teenagers. His father died, you knew that.
For as long as he’s been in America it’s as if Valentine stopped changing when I stopped seeing him — I’ve gone on imagining him as a boy of seventeen. He ages now all at once with a rush: Valentine’s the same age as we are — no, he’s a year older. And then I think that I can’t really remember him at all. I’m interested in the news of his return, of course, but I don’t know what it means: perhaps nothing. He’s been at home for months and hasn’t looked for me. The past is closed up inside its own depressing little museum of faded styles and codes and anticipations; you can’t re-enter it. Actually I feel angry with him for returning. Of course Madeleine wants to ask me about Luke, whether Luke knows anything about his father. And I reply firmly, as if it’s not up for discussion, that he knows his biological father went away, that’s all. He knows that his father never knew anything about him. Mac is his father now and he loves Mac, Mac loves him. Nothing else matters.
Really Valentine’s return doesn’t seem to matter much. I reassure Madeleine that it’s most unlikely his path will ever cross with mine. As far as I’m concerned, I tell her, his being a thousand miles away or three makes no difference at all. We progress to talking about other things instead: she’s staying over at her mum’s for a week so we arrange to go shopping one afternoon, and to take both our mothers out to lunch together at the weekend. All this gives me a good excuse for staying on in town beyond the days when I’m actually at the Gatehouse. I confess to Madeleine that I find myself seeking out excuses so as not to spend too much time in our country house, though there’s nothing wrong between Mac and me.
— But I’m just not ready to settle down to country life, and he is.
— I don’t blame you. All those green wellies and Tories and garden fetes. Perfect for holidays, but you wouldn’t want to live there.
The country is more complicated than Madeleine thinks (she’s such a Londoner these days and can’t believe there’s real life anywhere else). Our country friends aren’t really Tories, they’re just not very interested in politics, they’re interested in other things. Our nearest neighbour, for instance, is an ecologist and expert in early music; the woman who helps Mac with the heavy work in the garden used to be in West End musicals. And I love my view of the church tower — its rooks rising like specks against the clouds — through the arched window on the staircase. Only I have the idea that moving down there permanently would be like passing through the quiver in the old glass to the other side, leaving something unfinished behind.
I do really, mostly, meanwhile, forget about Valentine; only every so often, underneath the surface of my conversation with Madeleine and then in the days that follow, at work and in the flat, I come upon the new knowledge of his nearness in the city — like knocking up against some disconcerting piece of loose flotsam. Funnily enough, if there had been even the remotest chance of some kind of romantic renewal between us, I think the idea of him would be less interesting. There’s something infantilising and shaming in those Friends Reunited stories of childhood sweethearts getting back together. But I’m not succumbing to any secret hope that Valentine will have changed his sexuality while he’s been away. Quite the contrary, in fact: it’s the absence of the sexual motive which makes the idea of him intriguing for me. I realise that I’m starting to exaggerate him in my mind, imagining him like the demigod on the Greek vase, set apart from mortals, initiated into mysteries, bestowing gifts. Bestowing them on me: gifts of wisdom, or some kind of absolution. How absurd. He did use to look a bit like a demigod, when he was seventeen. He had that swaggering air of careless luck and a blissful uncomplicated beauty, as if his face and body were drawn in a few clean lines.
But now he’ll be middle-aged, I tell myself.
He’ll probably be dissipated, raddled, awful.
I don’t know how much it matters, knowing your biological father. I’ve never known mine. A few years ago my mother suddenly became very agitated and conspiratoriaclass="underline" it turned out that, of all things, my real father had got in touch with her. He had got hold of my Uncle Ray through the Internet (Ray’s a computer enthusiast) and sent a message to him: the whole process was alien to Mum, who won’t have a computer in the house — though Luke has tried patiently to persuade her.