A phone started burbling. It was sitting in a holder below the dashboard. Tanya didn’t pick it up. She never did when driving. How did I know that? I knew it because we’d continued to see one another secretly over the years. Geoff once phoned while we were together in the car. She pulled over into a lay-by to take the call. We were en route to a pub and I sat there, feeling nothing at all, while she told him she would be home by seven for dinner.
All we’d ever done on those clandestine meetings was talk. Though we seldom discussed the past or the doings of our respective partners, we always found more than enough to say. A couple of hours every few months, mostly in public places: restaurants, museums, art galleries. Rationed time, both of us very adult about it, though for me it was never enough.
The phone went silent. I checked it. No message had been left. It was another mobile number. Tanya thought it might be someone ringing to confirm an engagement. Nothing that couldn’t wait.
I felt punch-drunk, careening between Owain’s life and insistent recollections of my own past that I urgently needed to recapture. I couldn’t stop any of them.
After Tanya had left for Europe I’d immersed myself in looking after Rees and found myself increasingly entangled with Lyneth. She gave me driving lessons and often invited both of us to dinner at her parents’ house. They were pleasant professional people with none of my father’s prickliness. I think Rees found it comforting. Then postcards from Tanya started to arrive. She was in Bruges, Ghent, Antwerp, Aachen and Cologne. Her messages were cheery but brief, concentrating on snapshot descriptions of the places she was visiting. As the months went by her progress across Europe began to describe a political as well as geographical trajectory: Berlin, Dresden, Prague, Wroclaw, Krakow, Warsaw. The postcards varied from conventional city landmark scenes to pictures of red light districts, punk bars, busts of Stalin painted pink or decorated with Mickey Mouse ears.
Rees and I spent the Christmas holidays in Florida with Lyneth and her family. A few weeks later a brown envelope arrived. Inside was a hand-made card, a photograph stuck to its front. It showed Tanya standing in the snow, backdropped by the onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral. She was holding a big placard on which she had scrawled in red: Seasons Greetings from Red Square, Love, T. In her fur hat and boots she looked small and alone, dwarfed by the wintry grandeur of the place. At the time it never occurred to me to wonder who had taken the photograph.
I passed my driving test. Rees recovered sufficiently to enrol on a computer programming course in Swansea. Despite his illness he’d done well in his ‘A’ Levels and would depart for Bristol University the following autumn. My father was back in Oxford and I had a temporary job through his auspices with a BBC Wales documentary team that was investigating industrial decline in the Gwent and Rhondda valleys. Throughout the early months of the year I accompanied them, helping out with everything from fetching sandwiches to location scouting. Eventually I ended up in Cardiff, assisting with studio editing.
As spring advanced I missed Tanya more keenly than ever. There had been no further word from her since Christmas. Certain that she was now back in England, I mustered the courage to phone. It was Tatiana who answered. She was away again, I was told. Again? She’d returned for the New Year, before more travelling. To the East. No, she didn’t say when she would be coming home.
Tatiana was not unfriendly, but it was obvious she knew that Tanya and I were no longer an item. I tried calling Geoff a number of times. Finally it was answered by a student. Geoff had gone away, was renting out the house for a year.
I was convinced that Tanya had probably phoned while I was in Florida, but my father claimed there had been no calls. Soon afterwards another photograph arrived. It showed Tanya and Geoff standing outside what looked like a sports stadium. Geoff was wearing a puffy pleated jacket and a big grin. He had his arm around Tanya’s shoulder. On the back Tanya had scribbled a message to say that they were touring the Ukraine and that she hoped things were going better for me at home. It was signed with her initial but no endearment. A postscript said: “Tried the chicken. Nothing special.” From this I gleaned that the photograph had been taken in Kiev.
I’d been outflanked, and it was no more than I deserved. I became prey to all sorts of grubby jealous fantasies. At this point the plug was abruptly pulled on the documentary and I was out of a job. I informed Lyneth that I intended to return to London to find work. She startled me by saying that she would come too. In the event, it was the following autumn before we found a place to live, by which time Tatiana was dead and Tanya half a world away.
EIGHTEEN
Breaded chicken and chips. It was garnished with token salad items, a few lettuce leaves, a sliver of cucumber, a tomato segment. Tanya had a vegetable lasagne. We were sitting at a table in a pub, next to a window overlooking a deserted flagstone patio with trestle tables.
Try as I might, I had no control over my translations to and from Owain’s world. It was vital Tanya suspected nothing of this seesawing; she’d have me back in hospital before I knew it.
“Want to eat outside?” she asked.
It was smoky and hot in the pub, and the place was bustling. I thought I recognised it but my memory wouldn’t cooperate. What were we doing here?
“O?”
“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”
I contemplated my plate of food. I contemplated Australia. The notion of Lyneth having a sister who lived there was persistent. Had we had a row before Christmas so that she had taken the girls away? Perhaps she had deliberately isolated herself from contact. Had I done something so awful she wouldn’t have anything further to do with me, hospitalised or not? Was that why Tanya had looked anxious when I mentioned her name?
I wasn’t going to ask her. I was still under scrutiny.
“Do you know where my mobile is?” I asked.
Tanya swabbed her lips with a serviette. “I assume it was lost in the accident.”
Very convenient. All my phone numbers were listed on it. My old address book was long gone. I couldn’t remember Lyneth’s mobile number, or even that of our home. I had no idea of our address either, only that it was in south London. Couldn’t picture the house. My efforts to do so only filled me with a suffocating panic. How much longer was this going to go on?
“O?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t worry. We can get you a new one.”
I couldn’t allow my agitation to show. I still wasn’t sure whether these speculations of mine were in fact true. But they would explain Lyneth’s absence. What had I done? Something so hurtful that she could never forgive me? Something physically hurtful, even?
No, I was certain I could never have harmed her. So what had we rowed about? Something to do with Tanya? Was this why she was here and not Lyneth? Why couldn’t I remember with any certainty? Surely it couldn’t just be my medication?
The urge to ask was more than counterbalanced by the feeling that some rickety mental edifice would come crashing down. I couldn’t risk it yet. But if Lyneth had taken the girls away, my memory of the four of us together in Regent Street immediately before the accident had to be false. As false as the fleeting belief that I had later stood at their gravesides.
The pub’s hubbub washed over me. I speared a chip, heard the throosbing of a domestic hot water geyser. It was mounted on the wall above the sink. I n so bare windowless room, ranks of white china cups and saucers washed and upended on the stainless steel draining board.