The verge practice

14

That evening Kathy ate alone. There had been no sign of the McNeils at the hotel, and when Linda and Tony had half-heartedly suggested that she join them for the evening she had tactfully declined, saying that she wanted to look for a pair of shoes, then have an early night. Linda had suggested some places nearby and Kathy had left them to it. She did in fact buy a pair of sandals in a street off the Placa de Catalunya, and had then strolled for a while through the narrow winding streets of the Gothic Quarter before emerging onto the Rambla. It was still early by Spanish standards, and she was able to get a table on a first-floor balcony overlooking the street. She sat, sipping a glass of chilled white ranci wine and watching the passing stream of people in the street below.

For a moment she thought she spotted Audrey McNeil’s auburn hair among the crowd, but before she could be sure the figure was hidden behind a bookstall. Sitting there on her own, she realised that she enjoyed being the one uncoupled person in their party, and that she didn’t envy the others their companionable state. She had a man of her own to go home to, of course, and she was lucky that, even after living in a confined space with him for six months, he could still make her knees go weak with a look or a touch. She thought of Tony and Linda, whose knees looked to be in a permanent state of weakness, and, at the other end of the relationship scale, of Audrey and Peter, who knew each other so well by now that they could anticipate their partner’s every thought and word before it was formed. She dreaded getting to that stage with Leon, and wondered if that was a bad sign.

For her, orphaned in her teens, the idea of Leon still living with his parents at thirty-two had seemed weird, and it had seemed a big enough step to get him to move in with her. But what happened next? Somewhere she had read that, for unmarried couples living together, making a commitment before X months was too soon, and after Y months was too late, but she couldn’t remember the numbers. Was six months too short or too long? Neither of them had raised the subject of marriage, let alone children. For a moment she imagined returning to London and finding that Leon, feeling lost in her absence, now wanted to commit, and she realised with a little twinge of guilt that the idea made her feel uncomfortable. Why was that? Was it just the congestion at home, easily fixed up by getting somewhere bigger? Or was it something else? Fear, perhaps, of suffocation or of being betrayed.

The waiter appeared with her starter, amanida catalana, the local antipasto. Oh well, she thought, how many people got it right anyway? What the hell were Brock and Suzanne doing, living at opposite ends of the county? She smiled to herself and lifted her glass in a silent toast to the old man. Maybe this was why they got on so well, sharing the same maladjustments.

Five hundred miles to the north, Sandy Clarke was also sitting alone, nursing a drink and contemplating the mysteries of human relationships. He was in the kitchen of his home, his laptop open in front of him on the pine table, the cursor blinking on a half-composed email. He had a large brandy in his hand, the third of the evening. After a strained interview with the police that morning, Denise, his wife of twenty-four years, had gone to stay with her parents for an indefinite period. Not knowing exactly what she had learned, or suspected, from her meeting with DCI Brock, Sandy had found it impossible to remonstrate with her. He’d wanted to tell her that nothing he had done had any bearing on their relationship, which he had always regarded as rock solid, mainly due to her utter dependability; nonetheless, he dreaded being asked to explain exactly what it was he had done. So he had said nothing and Denise had said nothing, and in silence she had gone.

The curious thing was that he felt almost relieved, as if some enormous responsibility had been lifted from his shoulders. In fact, the very greatest responsibility, for Denise, he now came to realise, had occupied a place so absolutely central to his life over the past twenty-four years that her removal made the other countless responsibilities-to his children and parents, to the firm, to clients and employees, to the old couple who maintained the investment villas in Greece, to the sports club of which he was president and the committee on design education of which he was chair, to the collector of taxes and the deliverer of newspapers-all seem somehow erased and meaningless, as if they had only existed in terms of that twenty-four-year life and if that were taken away then none of them counted any more.

This fantasy-for he knew it was only that, but what an unexpectedly beguiling fantasy it was!-gave him a literal sense of weightlessness, as in a recurrent childhood dream when he had floated down his suburban street in his pyjamas. He hadn’t recalled that dream in forty-five years, and yet he could see it now as vividly as when it was fresh. He smiled, thinking of the small boy who had had the dream, a stranger now, yet somehow living deep inside him still.

He wondered whether Charles had had dreams like that, and immediately, at the thought of Charles, the sense of weightlessness vanished. Oh Charles, he thought sadly, I am so sorry. Too late, of course, but still, so very sorry.