Bookends

Chapter twenty-eight

At half past four on Monday a woman walks into the shop with a large bunch of flowers and asks for me by name before handing me the flowers. This is vaguely cheering because today has been the day from hell.

I just feel that everything is going wrong in my life. Too much is changing too quickly. I can’t blame Portia for that, but her return has damaged the equilibrium far more than I could ever have anticipated.

Which I suppose is ridiculous, because whether Portia had come back or not, Si would still have met Will and would still have contracted the virus, but nothing feels safe any more, and I seem to spend most of my time waiting for the next bomb to fall.

And can it really be simply coincidence that everything seems to have changed since she first turned up at the party at Bookends? If it were only one thing, I could handle it. If, say, Si had been diagnosed, and everything else was fine, I could cope. But Si’s diagnosis, and Josh’s affair, and then to have Si turn on me, is just too much.

Just for a change I didn’t sleep well over the weekend. I spent the entire two days on my own, unable to face anyone, and at night everything that Si had said kept going through my mind, and I kept telling myself that I would feel better about it in the morning, but each morning, as soon as I awoke, I knew that the black cloud was still there.

And I haven’t called him. Perhaps I should have done, because he, after all, is the one who is truly going through hell, whereas I am just experiencing it second hand, but I need some time and space to forgive him, and I’m hoping that a few days will be enough.

He won’t be coming tonight. Won’t turn up after the conversation the other night, if, that is, he remembers anything at all, because God knows how much alcohol he had, in fact, consumed.

And now I have to deal with Portia myself, which is fine, especially given that she was clearly not the object of Josh’s affections. I am only slightly astonished at how quickly I have managed to forgive her that alleged infidelity, although quite how quickly I will forgive her for disrupting my life, our lives, beyond all measure is another story indeed.

I drop the flowers off at home, waiting until I’m in a cab on the way to Soho before opening the card, although I already know they’ll be from Si. Sure enough: ‘For Cath. I’m so, so sorry and I’m too frightened to call. You’re a far better friend than I could ever hope for, and I need you. Please forgive me. Will explain when you call. Will you? Soon? Love you, sweets. S.’

It doesn’t even bring a smile to my face, not yet, not when the hurt is so raw, but I tuck the card safely in my diary, knowing that it will be something I will keep.

I am shown into the bar at the Groucho, and I see Portia instantly, because at this hour the bar is not yet crowded. She is sitting in a corner, sipping a gin and tonic, looking stunning.

I walk over and she stands to greet me, her face lighting up when she first sees me, the smile fading as she realizes I am not smiling in return, or not, at least, with quite the same brilliance.

‘Cath.’ She opts for the double kiss on the cheek, her voice warm but businesslike. ‘You’re looking great. It feels like ages. What can I get you?’

A gin and tonic arrives and I sip it slowly, thinking how easy it would be to fall into the arms of alcohol when under stress, how I may not be able to forgive Si for what he said, but I can certainly understand how he came to say it.

We make small talk for a while. I talk about the shop and how busy we’ve been, and she tells me she has also been travelling for work. Last weekend to New York, this weekend Europe.

We talk about New York. About where she stays, what she does. I say that it is somewhere I have always wanted to go, but I am quite sure that if I went, I would never return, because my love for the city would be so strong.

‘How do you know that?’ she laughs.

‘Because of Woody Allen and NYPD Blue,’ I reply, in all seriousness, and even as she’s laughing I wonder whether she is mentally filing this away, only for the phrase to pop up in a future episode of the series.

The series. How can I sit here and pretend that I am here merely on a social call, a catch-up, an innocent girls’ night out? How can we talk about New York, and Woody Allen films, and work, when she is exposing all our secrets in her series, when we don’t even know what some of those secrets are?

‘Portia,’ I interrupt her gently, mid-flow. ‘There’s something I need to talk to you about.’

‘Ah,’ she sits back. ‘I thought there was something,’ and she shrugs. ‘I thought, when you phoned, that perhaps I had been going mad, that perhaps you hadn’t been avoiding me all these weeks.

‘I wasn’t going mad was I?’

I shake my head. ‘No, but that’s not what I want to talk to you about, that was Si and I thinking that you and Josh were having an affair, because I saw you in Barnes one night, in a restaurant, and I was so furious with you, but now, obviously, we know that’s not true, and anyway, that’s irrelevant, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.’

‘Hang on, hang on. You saw us in that restaurant?’

‘Yes, but it doesn’t matter now,’ and I’m about to continue but I see that I have truly thrown Portia, and I stop, astonished, and curious to hear what she is about to say.

‘Oh, Cath, I didn’t know. No wonder you and Si had been so awful to me. I can’t blame you. But you know we didn’t have an affair, Josh and I, although not for want of trying, on my part, anyway.’

I stop, astonished at Portia giving away so much information. ‘What do you mean?’

She sighs. ‘I mean that for years I had always thought that Josh was the one to get away. You know how they say there’s always one? A lost love? I convinced myself it was Josh, and that if Josh and I were together, then I would live happily ever after.’

Aha. Her happy ending. Despite myself I’m amazed that Si was right, that there was an ulterior motive behind it all.

‘I managed to persuade him to come to that restaurant that night, and I only managed it because he was tired, and lonely, and things, as you probably know, weren’t going that well with Lucy, and I thought it would be the perfect window of opportunity.

‘He needed someone to talk to, and I made sure he knew I’d be listening, and then I planned on bringing him back to my place and seducing him.’

Jesus. What a bitch.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ she says. ‘And I agree. It was disgusting behaviour, but I hardly knew Lucy then, and I’d spent ten years thinking about Josh. Ten years thinking that he was the only man who could ever make me happy, and here he was, telling me he was unhappy. God, Cath. I’m only human.’

I don’t say anything, just wait for her to continue.

‘And you know, he was so grateful for my being there. He was so sweet to me, so tender towards me, I really thought it was going to happen.’

‘So what happened?’ I prompt as she lapses into silence, evidently thinking back to that night.

‘It didn’t take long to see that Josh saw me as an old friend who was concerned, who would be there to listen, and that was it. He sat there and talked about his marriage all night. He talked about Lucy, about how much he loved her, how special their relationship was, and how he couldn’t understand why they seemed to be drifting apart since Bookends.’

‘So you didn’t try to seduce him?’

‘Even at the beginning of the evening I still thought I would. I thought it would be the perfect time, but the more he talked the more I realized that he really loved Lucy, and that I’d be wrecking a marriage that had been perfectly happy apart from this one glitch that would soon sort itself out.’

‘But Josh was always in love with you. You know that.’

‘Of course I knew that, which is why I was so convinced I could get him. And you know what, Cath? Maybe I could have done. But I knew it wouldn’t have been fair, and I also knew that he and Lucy were meant to be together. Not him and me. I’d been building this fantasy for ten years, and I understood that night that reality would never match the fantasy.’

I sit there in silence for a while, stunned. Stunned at her honesty, and the courage it must have taken to walk away. And stunned at my behaviour, mine and Si’s, for jumping to conclusions and behaving so appallingly towards her.

‘But you know,’ she says, after a while, ‘life works in very mysterious ways.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I needed to be here now, to meet up with all of you again. Just because Josh wasn’t The One, doesn’t mean that things won’t work out, just not in the way that I’d actually planned… well…’ She is about to say something more but evidently changes her mind, and picks up her drink with a smile and a small shrug.

We sit and talk softly, and another hour goes by, and there is such an air of intimacy, of trust, that when Portia asks about Si, asks how he is, where he is, I almost find myself telling her. But I don’t. Not quite.

We carry on talking, and the conversation moves on to sex, and we start laughing as we remember exploits of old, and then sex becomes safe sex, which becomes AIDS, because that was always Portia’s greatest fear.

And I tell her I have a friend who has just been diagnosed HIV positive. I don’t mention names. I don’t say it is a particularly close friend. I just say a friend. And Portia becomes very quiet. Too quiet. And I suspect she knows, but she won’t say anything.

‘How is your friend taking it?’ she says quietly.

‘Nobody knows yet, except me. And you now, obviously. How is he taking it? Not great. At times I think he’s fine, he’s accepted it, realized that it doesn’t mean, as you said, death. And then he phones me in the middle of the night, drunk, frightened, furious, and I know that he feels it’s the end of the world.’

‘Has he started counselling?’

‘Not really. He’s been to the HIV clinic, and he’s got all the leaflets, but he hasn’t joined a group, although God knows he needs to.’

Portia appears to be deep in thought, and eventually she asks, ‘Cath, do you think he’d talk to a friend of mine?’

‘What for?’

‘I have this friend, Eva. She’s a bit older than us, mid-thirties, but she’s been diagnosed as HIV positive for thirteen years, picked up during her early twenties in New York when she got into a drug scene, and she’s the most amazing woman I know.’

I sit forward in my chair, interested.

‘I think that your friend should meet her, because she’s incredibly inspirational. She turned her life around when she was diagnosed, and she has this extraordinary outlook on having HIV.’

‘How did she turn her life around?’

Portia smiles. ‘It’s a long story, but I think she’s someone he should definitely meet. We should put them in touch with one another, and she could tell him her story herself. I don’t know your friend, obviously, but Eva is a great healer, and it might help to see things from another perspective, turn him around, if you like.’

‘Portia, I don’t know what to say. That would be wonderful.’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she says, giving me a sad smile. ‘It’s the least I can do.’

And it’s only the next day that I realize I didn’t even mention Josh and Ingrid, the very reason for meeting her in the first place. Somehow our rediscovered friendship got in the way of the accusations, and I never got around to it. Si said that he would ask, but then said that if Portia was that friendly with Ingrid, which apparently she is, she would hardly tell us the truth, given how close we are to Lucy. So we’re still in the dark, but quite frankly there are far more important things to deal with right now.

And I’m not sure what I expected from Portia, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t expect this from her. Not in a million years did I ever think she would be the one to dive in and rescue Si, but by introducing him to Eva, by offering us help and then immediately coming up with a day and time, this is precisely what she has done.

I told Si what Portia had said, and Si said I could tell her, as long as I swore her to secrecy. Of course she said she already knew it was Si, and that she wouldn’t dream of telling a soul, other than Eva, of course.

And I can’t help but feel that Si and I have been far too unfair on her – have misjudged her enormously, because every time we think she has betrayed us, we end up being wrong. And although Si was right when he kept saying she had come back for a reason and it wouldn’t be a good one, I think she has now redeemed herself.

Si phoned me on the Wednesday afternoon, the day of Portia’s dinner, and said that he couldn’t be bothered and was about to ring to cancel, but somehow – God knows how – I managed to talk him into going, and then sat on tenterhooks, waiting to hear what happened.

When Si got home, he was buzzing. He phoned me immediately, told me that already, after spending an evening with this woman Eva, this woman who was HIV positive, he felt entirely different.

She was tiny, he said. Tiny, dark, very pretty, and the picture of health. She sat there drinking sparkling mineral water, listening to Si, before quietly telling her story.

In 1980, when she was fifteen, she fell in with the dope-smoking crowd at school. No big deal. She did it because everyone else was doing it, and because it made her feel, for the first time, like she belonged. Most people grow out of it, but Eva didn’t, she did the reverse, and within a couple of years she had progressed to speed, and soon, because other people did, and because she fancied one of the boys in her crowd who did, she was using heroin. The remainder of her school days were blurred by the heroin, as were her emotions, and at twenty she took herself off to New York, hoping for a drug-free stay and a fresh start.

Within two days of arriving at JFK she was living with a coke dealer, and using again. This time she started hanging out in ‘shooting galleries’. Grotty rooms in old brownstones in the wrong part of town, havens for the junkies who would score from the dealer on the corner, then go to these rooms as safe places to shoot up. And Eva, the youngest of them all, would be given their leftovers, together with the dirty needles that had been passed around the entire room. And of course she didn’t know. No one did.

Back home, two years later, Eva went to university. Middle class, bright, she was studying Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and trying, unsuccessfully, to give up heroin, turning to alcohol on the rare occasions she managed to go without.

And then the ‘tombstone’ adverts appeared. Adverts warning about AIDS and HIV, warning of the dangers of unprotected sex, of not knowing your partners’ sexual history. Of shared needles and drug use.

It couldn’t be me, she thought. Things like that don’t happen to middle-class girls like me. To rule it out, she went to her doctor and requested a test. Two weeks later she went back in for her results. The doctor said, distractedly, you’re positive. Go to the STD clinic at the local hospital.

Twenty-one years old, HIV positive, perhaps she should have felt that her life was over, but Eva didn’t feel that. She didn’t feel anything, her emotions still cushioned by the drugs, the drinking, and it was only a year later, when she lay in bed, thinking about her lifestyle, about how she was treating herself – smoking, drinking, not eating – that she realized she had to make a choice.

She realized that by giving in to HIV, by expecting it to take her life, she was removing all choice, and that, for her, was untenable. She didn’t choose to die, she suddenly realized. She chose to live, and she refused to give in to the fear, because fear, she still says, is the most toxic thing of all.

A year after being diagnosed, Eva set up an illness and recovery group. She threw herself into working with AIDS awareness groups, for various charities, teaching, helping, advising. Then one day she woke up, and, in spite of everything she’d done, everyone she’d taught, she still felt that one day this thing, AIDS, was going to get her.

And that was when she decided it wasn’t. She turned to Buddhism, to believing in one day at a time. She stopped believing there was no point in training in anything worth while because her life was about to end, and started to train in Cranio-Sacral Therapy, finding a spirituality there that had been missing in her life.

And she found a therapist who refused to allow her to become a victim. If she had a cough, her therapist would turn to her and say: ‘So you’ve got a cough? So what?’ He didn’t say it would be the onset of PCP pneumonia. He didn’t say it was a symptom of full-blown AIDS. He said it was just a cough, and you know what? He was right, and she learned that even when you have been diagnosed, not everything is HIV related.

Now, thirteen years on, she is the picture of health. It may not work for everyone, she told Si, as she was coming to the end of her story, but what works for her is to believe she’s fine.

‘And she really is,’ Si told me, in wonder, in awe, and then he said goodbye and put down the phone, because he had the rest of the night to think about what she’d said.