‘Oh, that,’ he said.
That week we met every day. Why couldn’t he just be honest about what was going on, given that I never gave him a hard time about anything except drink and lying?
He said: ‘I lie to myself all the time. How can I be honest with you?’
I said: ‘Exactly.’ And, ‘Are you honest with her?’
I had a sense of him then, as a grenade with the pin out. But I was very angry. I told him, we can’t break up because we’re not together, but whatever we have going on, whatever all this has been, it’s over.
Swift and I had it all worked out. He wanted to carry on being his old self with a new person who didn’t know him well, when what he needed was to become a new him.
*
I wrote three novels about an English belly dancer in love with Cairo. Something of Robert crept into the policeman character. The first, Baby Love, was listed for the Orange Prize; I went to the party and spent it with Nina Sequin-Smythe. We picked up Claire Rayner, the agony aunt, and talked about Robert all evening.
I spent time in Cairo, researching. Julio was around. I didn’t see much of Robert, though he’d pitch up sometimes when he was lonely, and I would be polite.
*
In June 1997 I dreamed I had to cut my foot off. It was an epic dream, full of adventure and difficulty in labyrinthine mansions with hanging bridges and invisible enemies. I was sitting panting on a low ledge, having escaped something, and had to cut my foot off. I used a bread knife. Then Lola had a drama, and when that was done we sighed with relief – then remembered the foot. It was sitting there on its own, waxy, yellowish, but not bloody, its surface at the ankle healed over into a slightly flaccid stump.
‘But what about your leg!’ she cried. We turned our attention to my bereft ankle, only to find that it had grown another foot, a perfectly good one. I wriggled the toes, and turned it this way and that, and it was fine. Healthy, plump, pink and operative. I was wearing the black sandals that I had bought to go to Greece with Robert.
We looked back at the forlorn, dismembered foot. We were sorry for it, and picked it up to cuddle it. ‘What should we do with it?’ I wondered.
‘Take it to your mum,’ Lola said.
The next morning I told Lola about the dream. She was fascinated. ‘I know who made you cut it off,’ she said, rather importantly. ‘It was a robber.’
‘Robert?’ I said.
‘Not Robert. Robber. But Robert is a robber,’ she said.
Well of course, to the infant, Robert was a robber. Stole the mother’s time and affections, stole into her mother’s bed, stole peace of mind, stole sleep, stole the heart from the mother and the mother from the child.
‘Why’s Robert a robber?’ I asked.
‘Oh you know,’ she said, going back to her colouring book.
I told my friends about the dream, and what she had said. One suggested a Viking burial – put the foot on a model ship and set fire to it, launched out on the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens. Or put it away in a box? No, it would moulder, and smell.
They all knew that Robert was getting married.
Yeah, he was getting married.
I knew the foot was the love I still carried for Robert. I wondered why I was denigrating it. Because I had denigrated it all along. If I could make it small enough and non enough, then it wasn’t even happening, and then no one could mock me for loving such an unfaithful man (There was nothing to be faithful to! It wasn’t like that!) and I wouldn’t be sad when it ended.
The foot floated around behind me all day, as if tied by a string. Of course I was glad not to marry him. The night he came to tell me he was engaged he drank half a bottle of gin, neat, and smoked up a storm; he put on John Coltrane and talked rubbish of the highest order. He was holding my feet, and clutching at me; and the ex-lover in me was saying get off, get off, and the friend was thinking, Jesus. It was a bravura presentation of pre-wedding nerves. I got him as far as the door three times but he stood facing me, still talking, and I couldn’t shut the door in his face. Three times he came back in the house. I said no. Please, he said. No. Please. He leaned against the kitchen door, propped up, his head back, looking about seventeen.
‘You deserve,’ he said, ‘to love and be loved on a regular basis.’ I thought, So do you. Go on. Do it.
The next day I was due to sit for a painter friend who was trying to do an oil-sketch portrait every day for six weeks. I thought I looked OK, despite having cried all night. He painted me wild-haired, bleak-eyed, mad.
‘Jesus,’ I said. ‘How could you tell?’
‘It’s my job,’ he said kindly.
I thought: ‘Some men look at women, and understand us.’
Robert used to. But he’d lost it. He was losing himself. I’d lost him.
*
I went round to my mother’s and told her about the dream and the foot.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘you can leave it with me if that would help.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I think it would.’
That evening my father rang. ‘Your mother told me about the foot,’ he said. ‘We’re looking after it. We thought we might plant it in the garden, see if it might grow?’
The child thought that was a good idea. ‘It could grow a tree with little new feet on it. Then we’d have lots of feet if we needed them.’
*
The wedding was in August. He invited me the night before; I didn’t go. The wedding albums are under the piano. I don’t look at them. I’ve been told it started well and they were happy. At the time, of course he didn’t confide in me. He was busy elsewhere.
I went to dinner once. Robert showed me round: his music room, his family grandfather clock in the hall. I felt like a pair of sticks walking, dry and pointless and about to snap. In 1998 their son was born. Robert brought him over sometimes, in his buggy. He adored his child; absolutely adored him. He’d be jiggling the buggy with his foot, chatting and joking with him while trying to smoke in the opposite direction. He was working hard and, the times I did see him, drinking a lot. His wife always looked great.
Once I went into our local Nepalese restaurant to pick up a takeaway. It was known as the Office, for the time Robert spent working in there – and there he was, working, at a back table. I hadn’t seen him for perhaps a year or more. He looked up, gestured to a beer on the table, and said: ‘You took yer time. That’s for you—’
If I don’t say much about the marriage, I mean no disrespect – quite the contrary. I’m not ignoring it, denigrating it, or writing it out of history. But I wasn’t there. I don’t know about it, and it’s not my business. They married; they had a child. This story jumps three years while they are doing that.
London, Wiltshire, 2000
He arrived on the front doorstep on a Sunday afternoon, while I was having lunch in the back garden with Swift and David.
‘How are you?’ I said. He looked terrible: distraught, humbled, sarcastic, confused, angry.
‘Not great,’ he said. ‘She’s kicked me out.’
‘God,’ I said. ‘When?’
‘Ten minutes ago,’ he said. His house was ten minutes from mine.
‘Where will you stay?’ I asked.
‘Well,’