He had been about to eat but put his sandwich back in the box and the box down on the bench. ‘What was the worst thing about Jonathan?’
I covered my mouth because I had just tipped coffee into it and I was shocked, then laughing and unable to swallow. Patrick handed me a serviette and waited for me to answer.
I said the stupid things first: his wet-looking hair, the way he dressed. That he never waited until I was out of the car before he started walking away, that he wasn’t sure what his cleaning lady’s name was even though she had worked for him for seven years. I told him about the room in Jonathan’s apartment that had nothing in it except a drum kit that faced a mirrored wall. And then I took the lid off my cup and said, the worst thing is that I thought he was funny because he made everything sound like a joke. ‘But he meant everything he said, at the time. Then he would change his mind and mean the opposite, as absolutely. He said I was beautiful and clever, then insane and I believed all of it.’ I stared into my cup. I wished I had stopped at the mirrored wall.
Patrick rubbed underneath his chin. ‘Probably, the worst thing to me was the tan.’
I laughed and looked at him smiling at me and then not as much when he said, ‘And being there when he proposed to you.’ A feeling, like fizzing, moved up the back of my neck. ‘Seeing you say yes and not being able to stop it.’ The fizzing spread out, across my shoulders, down my arms, upwards into my hair.
My phone rang. I had not managed to say anything. Patrick said don’t worry and told me to answer it.
It was Ingrid. She said she was in a disabled loo in Starbucks, in Hammersmith, and she was pregnant. She had just done a test.
Because she was talking so loudly, Patrick heard and did a thumbs-up, then pointed to his watch and stood up, simulating walking back to work and texting me later. I mimed him taking our rubbish to the bin but said goodbye out loud.
Ingrid asked me who I was talking to.
‘Patrick.’
‘What? Why are you with Patrick?’
I said, ‘Something weird is happening. But, you’re pregnant. I am so excited. Do you know who the father is?’
I let her talk about it for as long as I could, about the baby, morning sickness, names, then said, ‘I’m so sorry, I have to get back to the office. I’ve got so much work to invent.’
Ingrid said okay. ‘Don’t get stuck there. Burning the five p.m. candle on a Friday.’
I was so happy for her and did not know how I was going to survive it.
*
I didn’t want to see anyone the next day. I was supposed to go to a thing with Patrick. He had already paid for the tickets. In the morning he texted me and I said I couldn’t go and, because he said okay and didn’t make me feel guilty, I texted back and said I actually could go.
It was an exhibition at the Tate, of works by a photographer who only seemed to photograph himself, in his own bathroom. Patrick became despondent as we entered the third room of it. We were both looking at a picture of the artist standing in his bath, wearing an undershirt and nothing else.
I said, ‘I don’t know much about art but I know I would rather be at the gift shop.’
Patrick said I’m really sorry. ‘Someone at work said it was amazing. I thought it sounded like your kind of thing.’
I put my hand on his arm and kept it there. ‘Patrick, my only thing is sitting, drinking tea or something else and talking, or even better, not talking. That is the only thing I ever want to do.’
He said good, okay, noted. ‘I think there is a café here. On the top floor.’
*
In the lift, he said, ‘You must be excited about Ingrid.’ I told him I was and felt glad that the doors were opening. We sat at a table by the window, sometimes looking at the river and sometimes at each other, and drank tea or something else, talking for a long time about other things than Ingrid being pregnant. Patrick, about being an only child and how much he used to envy Oliver for having a brother, then his memory of meeting me and Ingrid for the first time, how inscrutable our relationship had been to him, for years afterwards. He said, until then, he hadn’t known it was possible for two separate people to be that connected. From looking alike and talking alike and, in his memory, never being apart, it felt like there was a sort of force field around us, impenetrable to other people. Were there matching sweatshirts at one point, with something weird written on the front?
I told him there was – I still had mine but now, ‘nivers’ and a spray of sticky white bits was the only thing left across the chest. He said he remembered me having it on every single time he ever came to Goldhawk Road in the months I lived there.