Mr. Wright must think I was keen and energetic. But it wasn’t that. I was putting off going home. Partly because I didn’t want to return home without being any farther forward, but also because I wanted to avoid Todd. He’d phoned and offered to come to your funeral but I’d told him there was no need. So he planned to fly back to the States as soon as possible and would be coming to the flat to pick up his things. I didn’t want to be there.
The secretary with the German accent told me it was the last of three staff training days, so the students were absent. She agreed to my putting up a couple of notices. The first was information about your funeral. And the second asked your friends to meet me in a couple of weeks’ time at a café I’d seen opposite the college. It was an impulsive note, the date of the meeting chosen randomly, and as I pinned it up next to flat shares and equipment for sale I thought it looked like a ridiculous kind of notice and that nobody would come. But I left it anyway.
When I got home, I saw Todd waiting in the darkness, his hood pulled up against the sleet.
“I don’t have a key.”
I’d thought he’d taken one with him. “I’m sorry.”
I unlocked the door and he went into the bedroom.
I watched from the doorway as he packed his clothes, so meticulously. Suddenly he turned and it was as if he’d caught me off guard; for the first time we were properly looking at each other.
“Come back with me? Please.”
I faltered, looking at his immaculately packed clothes, remembering the order and neatness of our life in New York, a refuge from the maelstrom here. But my neatly contained life was in the past. I could never fly back to it.
“Beatrice?”
I shook my head and the small movement of denial made me vertiginous.
He offered to take the car back to the rental car people at the airport. After all, I clearly had no idea how long I’d be staying. And it was ludicrously expensive. The mundanity of our conversation, the attention to practical detail, was so soothingly familiar that I wanted to ask him to stay with me, plead with him to stay. But I couldn’t ask that of him.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to stay for the funeral?” he asked.
“Yes. Thank you, though.”
I gave him the keys to the rental car and only when I heard the car start up realized I should have given him the engagement ring. Twisting it around my finger, I watched through the basement window as he drove away and continued watching long after his car had disappeared from sight, the sounds of cars now strangers’ cars.
I felt caged in loneliness.
“Shall I go and get us some cakes?” he asks.
I am completely taken aback. “That would be nice.”
When he’s left, I dial Todd’s number at work. His PA answers the phone but doesn’t recognize my voice; it must be fully reanglicized. She puts me through to Todd. It’s still awkward between us but less so than it was. We’ve started the process of selling our apartment and discuss the sale. Then he abruptly changes the subject. “I saw you on the news,” he says. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Fine, thank you.”
“I’ve been meaning to apologize.”
“You have nothing to apologize for. Really, I’m the one who—”
“Of course I should apologize. You were right all along about your sister.”
There’s a silence between us, which I break. “So are you moving in with Karen?”
There’s a slight pause before he answers. “Yes. I’ll still pay my share of the mortgage, of course, until it’s sold.”
Karen is his new girlfriend. When he told me, I felt guiltily relieved that he had found a relationship so quickly.
“I didn’t think you’d mind,” says Todd and I think he wants me to mind. He sounds falsely cheerful. “I expect it’s a little like you and me, with the shoe on the other foot.”
I have no idea what I can say to that.
“ ‘If equal affections cannot be,’ ” says Todd, his tone light, but I know not to misinterpret that now. I dread him adding “let the more loving one be me.”
We say good-bye.
I reminded you I studied literature, didn’t I? I’ve had an endless supply of quotations at my disposal, but they have always highlighted the inadequacy of my life rather than provided an uplifting literary score to it.
Mr. Wright comes back with the cakes and cups of tea and we have five minutes’ time out from my statement and talk instead about small inconsequential things: the unseasonably warm weather, the bulbs in St. James’s Park, the emerging peony in your garden. Our tea together feels a little romantic, in a safe nineteenth-century kind of way, though I doubt Jane Austen’s heroines took tea from Styrofoam cups and had cakes packed inside clear plastic boxes.
