Maybe I should write a book on this. The way we have built this – whatever this is – without a picture of the end result on the front of the box for reference. The fact that I’m even here, waiting for words to appear on a screen, speaks volumes about the state of play. This is my dream, this festival. But I’m just as excited about the idea of Hugh’s incoming messages dangling on my phone. If you can’t lose your head a little after you’ve been dragged through hell, when can you?
Andrew appears across the bar and comes towards me. ‘Hey, what can I get you, Kate? Champagne? Wine? G’n’T? Cocktail?’
I feel like celebrating just the fact that we are here. ‘Champagne, thanks.’
Hugh has stopped typing now. Obviously re-thinking it. I’m fifteen again and bursting with nervous energy waiting for a boy to pass a note to me in class. It’s alarming how fast you can slip into this mindset once you open the door to it.
‘Here you are,’ Andrew says, a minute or two later, passing me a glass as I slip my phone into my bag.
‘What are we toasting?’ I ask.
‘To Cam?’ he says cautiously. ‘And . . . to Genevieve?’
I hover the glass near my lips. Those two hardly belong together in a toast. I can’t bring myself to utter the words, so I skip that bit and gulp down half the champagne. It’s barely touched my oesophagus before the warmth begins to diffuse the chatter in my brain. Even then, half a glass of champagne isn’t up to a predicament as steep as my own. Cam. Hugh. Genevieve. Career crisis. Thinking of selling the house, uprooting Charlie from his entire world . . .
‘You know, she’s no threat to you,’ Andrew says, and I wonder for a second if we’re talking about the young woman who just walked past us and clearly caught his eye. But of course we’re not. It’s bloody Genevieve. Again. A woman with the power to hold two men in her thrall for decades.
‘What happened in your relationships, Andrew? If you don’t mind my asking.’ I’m eager to shift the attention away from myself.
‘It was nothing to do with Gen, if that’s what you’re wondering.’
I wasn’t. But now that the thought is planted in my mind . . .
‘You know, you remind me of her. Have done, ever since Hugh told me about you months ago and I looked you up on LinkedIn. Seeing you in person, I can’t put my finger on what it is. Maybe it’s a certain look you get. Maybe your energy. You’re nothing alike, physically. She was classically beautiful . . .’
Oh!
‘Absolute knockout of a woman . . .’
Well, thanks for that comparison, Andrew. I hadn’t thought I could feel any more insecure about this, but we’ve plunged to new depths.
By the time Hugh appears in the doorway, Andrew has shared one too many extraordinary Genevieve anecdotes, I’m a champagne and several Proseccos into falling off the two-year near-abstinence wagon and I’ve requested Dancing Queen from the DJ while I FaceTime Grace from the middle of the dancefloor, crying about how much I miss her.
‘Remember the time we were spotted by ABBA’s manager and taken backstage to meet them?’ I ask her loudly, through alcohol-induced tears.
She laughs. ‘It was a Bjorn Again concert, Kate. Not that that stopped you from being starstruck! Love seeing you on a dancefloor, by the way. I’ve missed you!’
‘I miss you too!’
‘NO! I’ve missed YOU. This you. The old you.’
I’ve missed the old us. The Grace and I who’d laugh at ourselves until tears were rolling down our cheeks in dressing rooms. The friends who’d dance till the lights came on at pre-baby nights out at the one eighties-inspired nightclub in town. I’m struck by the loss of our spontaneity and lightness. The whole ‘Want to grab brunch? See you in twenty’ thing.
‘Hiya, neighbour!’ Justin says, popping into the frame. What’s this? I need to dampen my champagne-infused delight at seeing the two of them unexpectedly together. Keep it cool, Kate. You’ve retired from matchmaking!
Seeing them play happy families for a few seconds reminds me how lovely that can be. And I realise I’ve been stuck in the endless purgatory of loss. Enslaved by the extra burdens of raising a child who carries the very real anxiety that I might not come home from work one day. Fearing that outcome myself. Paying bills. Being responsible. Getting on with a life that isn’t Plan A but couldn’t in any sense be construed as a decent Plan B, either.
‘You know “caretaker mode” before an election?’ I say to Grace, moving off the dancefloor and away from the loudspeakers. ‘They dissolve the House of Reps and keep everything ticking over but they put the brakes on any major new decisions?’
She knows exactly what I mean. ‘That’s only ever meant to be a temporary mode, Kate.’
Yes.
Don’t stop living, just because I do.
As Hugh arrives and crosses the room, and Dancing Queen reaches a climax, I make Grace promise to tell me everything about the new romance when we next chat, and end the call. Hugh looks different. It’s not just the tousled hair and two-day stubble, though those do stray from his typical impeccability. It’s the wildness in his eyes. As if the fight or flight mechanism has kicked in and he’s been wrestling those demons of his – henceforth to be known as Genevieve – for hours.
He reaches me and, without ceremony, takes me gently by the wrist, pulls me back across the dancefloor in silence, then towards the door and outside into the cooler air, stopping beneath a string of fairy lights hanging from a cypress pine. The distant sky lights up, followed by the rumble of thunder, and the intensity in his blue eyes almost scorches my skin as he looks at me. Really looks at me. Walls down. Barriers stripped. Nothing but raw, exposed honesty between us now.
‘Kate,’ he says, his voice heavy. ‘You need to know about Genevieve. I want to tell you everything.’
34
Back at the beach house, waiting for the kettle to boil, Hugh looks nervous. He leans against the kitchen bench, arms crossed, staring at a spot on the cupboard while I get mugs and tea bags ready. Wow, she’s really done a number on him!
‘Is everything okay?’ I ask, as waves break on the beach. I’m not sure I really want to hear the answer.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s earlier. At the cafe. The whole . . .’
Spit it out, Hugh.
He looks straight at me. ‘This is exactly why I never . . .’ He shakes his head and gestures at me, and at him. At us, if you will. I’m still lost. The kettle clicks off and he pours water into the mugs. Then we move to the couch by the fire.
My mind is scrambling to work out what he could possibly be so nervous to tell me about, and it’s coming up blank. Scarily blank. This morning on the beach, which now seems like a thousand years ago, I was only just starting to vaguely admit that maybe, I don’t know, Hugh and I . . .
‘When Cam first got sick,’ Hugh begins, then falters. He inhales and expels the kind of steadying breath athletes take before the most important race of their lives. It only dials up my apprehension.
‘I thought this was about Genevieve,’ I interrupt.
‘Kate, this is going to be a difficult conversation. I know how you love those. And this isn’t a performance review—’