*
I ate all of the toast and the edges of the omelette and drank too much coffee before Patrick said he probably did need to go. We walked back and reaching the house, he stopped and put his hands in his pockets, the way he had the last time.
‘What?’
‘No, its just, you probably don’t remember –’
‘I do.’
He said, ah. ‘Okay, well, I should have apologised.’
I said it was my fault. ‘What were you supposed to say?’
‘I don’t know, but the way I said it. I upset you and I was sorry. I came back to tell you that, a few days later, but you were already in Paris. So, anyway, if it’s not too late, I’m sorry I made you cry.’
I said, ‘It wasn’t you. I thought so, at the time, but it was just Jonathan, I was so humiliated and that’s why I was so rude to you. So I’m sorry as well. And sorry if you smell like fat.’
We both smelled our sleeves. Patrick said wow. ‘Anyway –’ he got out his keys ‘– you probably need to go to sleep.’ He unlocked the car and thanked me for the breakfast he had paid for. It was ten o’clock in the morning. I said, ‘Goodnight Patrick,’ and watched him get in and drive away, standing there by myself, in my bridesmaid’s dress and my uncle’s jacket.
16
PATRICK TEXTED ME. It was still the day after Ingrid’s wedding, the afternoon.
‘Do you like Woody Allen movies?’
‘No. Nobody does.’
‘Do you want to see one with me tonight?’
‘Yes.’
He said he would pick me up at 7.10ish. ‘Do you want to know which one?’
I said, ‘They are all the same one. I will come outside at 7.09ish.’
There was a bar at the cinema. The film started but we never went in. At midnight, a man with a mop said sorry guys.
*
I had just started a job at a small publishing house that specialised in war histories written by the man who owned it. He was old and did not believe in computers or women coming to work in trousers. There were four of us in the office, all women, similar in age and appearance. The only thing he required us to do was bring him a cup of tea at eleven-thirty and shut the door on the way out.
We took turns. Once, on mine, I asked him if I could show him my father’s poems. I said he’d been called a male Sylvia Plath. The owner said, ‘That sounds painful’ and ‘Please don’t let it slam,’ gesturing towards the door.
Spring, then summer and we gave up the pretence of working and began spending our days on the roof, lying in the sun, reading magazines, with our skirts rolled to the tops of our thighs and eventually off altogether, as well as our tops. Patrick’s hospital was visible from up there and such a short distance away that the sound of ambulance sirens carried across the rooftops and the clump of green that was Russell Square.
That is where we saw each other, coincidentally the first time, both of us on our way to the Tube. Then by arrangement, sometimes, then every day. Before work, when the park was empty and the air was still cold, at lunchtime when it was hot and crowded and strewn with rubbish, after work, sitting on a bench until there was no daylight left and no more office workers cutting through the park on their way home and no more tourists standing in their way and the man finished with his rubbish sweeper and it was just us again. Then at some point he would say, ‘I should walk you to the Tube. It’s late and presumably you’ve got to be in at the crack of nine-thirty.’
Sometimes he was late and so sorry although I never minded waiting. Sometimes he was wearing his hospital outfit and his junior doctor trainers, which I made fun of to cover how desperately endearing I found them, with their puffy soles and, I said, jazzy purple bits.
Once, a lunchtime, Patrick put his hand out to take the sandwich I had brought him and we both saw there was something that looked like blood on the inside of his forearm. He apologised and went to a drinking fountain to wash it off and apologised again as he sat down.
I said it must be strange to have a job where people around you are dying. ‘Not of boredom, as in my case. What’s the worst thing about it? The children?’
He said, ‘The mothers.’
I picked up my coffee, embarrassed just then by the intensity of his job, against the stupidity of mine. I said, ‘Anyway, do you want to know the worst things about my job?’
Patrick said he felt like he already knew them all. ‘Unless there are some new ones from today.’
‘Ask me something else then.’