and around the edge. Solar lamps, Dan said. Light pollution, said Fitz. All right, all right, Dan sighed, we can’t all be eco-warriors. He got up to fetch whisky, poured a glass each.
‘To our reunion,’ he said. I thought of Alex then; I pictured her outside, watching us, unseen.
It was peaceful in that kitchen, seeing our reflections loom up out of the dark and holding easy conversation. I could have sat there all night, tempted for the first time for years to go on drinking into the small hours, listening to Fitz and Dan’s stories. But I had work in the morning, and an early start. When finally I said I should be going Fitz stood up too, said he’d walk along to the tube with me. Looking back to wave to Dan, I thought I caught a slightly wicked smile on his face as he rested a hand on Martin’s shoulder and watched us walk away.
*
It was both remarkable and unremarkable to be walking along a London street beside Fitz, as though the years had rolled away, as though we’d just got up that morning from the mattress on the floor in Empire Road, on our way to the market, and that afterwards we’d go back home and lie on his bed, listening to Pink Floyd, in his room that smelt of candles and crumbling walls, and sex.
That was if I ignored the skyline ahead, where glass and chrome reared up above Georgian brick and seventies concrete. That and the disturbing fact that we seemed to have run out of conversation, something we would never have done before. We went for some distance without speaking while I searched my mind for a topic that hadn’t been exhausted or that wouldn’t assume an intimacy we no longer had.
When we reached the junction with Islington High Street Fitz said, ‘You haven’t told me much, you know.’
‘I haven’t?’
‘No. You let me and Dan do all the talking. I know Dan can talk for England, but…’ He shrugged. ‘All I know, I mean of your personal life, is that you’re divorced and have one son who’s at university.’
‘So what else do you want to know?’ I teased. ‘You want to know if I’m with anyone?’
He laughed. ‘You can tell me to fuck off.’
‘Oh, no, I wouldn’t do that. Okay. So there is someone, but it’s…difficult. He might be moving. To Ireland.’
‘Right. Right.’ He waited for me to go on but pride stopped me from revealing I was involved with a married man. ‘And what happens if he does?’
‘That’s what I don’t know. He wants me to go. I haven’t decided.’
‘Which part of Ireland?’
‘Near Waterford.’
‘Is that so? Not too far from my family.’
‘Yes, I remember.’
‘You do?’
‘Of course I do. I remember—’ I was going to say everything. ‘I remember you talking about your holidays there, as if it was the land of milk and honey.’
‘Sure. It is gorgeous. You’d love it. But I suppose there are other things to consider.’
He was fishing. ‘Right, your turn,’ I said. ‘You might have talked a lot but it was all football, family and politics. What about you?’
‘What? Oh. Yeah.’ He sounded pointedly vague. ‘Her name’s Kirsty. We met at a party here in London, just over a year ago, but she lives in Cornwall. She’d like me to move down there, but I’m not sure. She lives in this tiny village, miles from anywhere. Well, miles from a cinema, or anything like that. It’d be better if she came up to London, but she’s got two boys, both still in school, so that isn’t going to happen.’
‘Do you have children?’
‘Me? No. I was never with anyone long enough.’
I let that hang. ‘You’d like Cornwall. You loved it on Jenny’s farm.’
‘Yeah, but for ever?’ Behind us a siren started and a police car raced down the street, weaving around cars that slewed into the kerb. Fitz neatly changed the subject. ‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘did you ever get to drama school? Did you try?’
‘No. I didn’t actually get back to school, after that summer.’
His head turned. ‘You left school?’
‘Uh-huh. I think I went for about three weeks, something like that. But I was in a bit of a state. Couldn’t concentrate. Didn’t see the point of anything.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘This and that. Some work in a record shop first. Then nannying, in Madrid.’ I didn’t tell him why, that I was chasing a sighting of Alex; I didn’t want to sound too hopeless. ‘I stayed away for a few years after that, went to Athens, some of the Greek islands, Paris. I worked in bars and restaurants.’
We turned onto a busy road and stopped at a crossing. Fitz was gazing at me with frank and utter surprise. Then he said, with his old habit of peeling away the layers, ‘So you did your own running away?’
‘I suppose you could say that.’
He went quiet, hands thrust deep into pockets, eyes fixed on the ground. We crossed the road, the tube station now visible, a few hundred yards away. We walked in silence and I was back in the awkwardness I’d felt earlier, unsure what to say and hating that, anxious that the evening shouldn’t finish this way. As if that matters, I told myself. You’re nothing to each other now, just two polite strangers. But then at the entrance Fitz began talking, out of the blue and a bit desperately, as though answerable to an accusation I hadn’t made.
‘One day, you know, after you left, I had this crazy idea about getting on a train to Sheffield and trying to track you down but I had no idea how. All I knew was you lived near a park. And then I thought I might make things worse for you. Your father was so angry I thought he’d go mad if… I just thought I should let you get on with your life.’
It was as if I couldn’t breathe, as if there were something sucking all the air out of me. I couldn’t possibly tell Fitz how much I’d lost the plot after that summer; it would seem too extreme. It did to me, now. ‘You were probably right,’ I said. ‘Either that or we’d have got bored with each other.’
He smiled, shrugged. ‘Young love. It wouldn’t have lasted.’ I thought he sounded relieved, as though he’d got what he needed from me. He stepped back a little.
‘I should go,’ I said, looking at my watch.
‘Sure,’ he said, and I cursed myself for bringing the conversation to an end, but there was also this urgency to run away from a tension that was tearing me up. It was as though I wanted to grasp Fitz and hold him to me but at the same time needed to push him away, put some space between us, so that I could breathe again. Just go, just go, I willed him, and as though I’d pushed a button I watched him lean in to give me a quick hug, and we said things like how good it had been to see each other, and how bizarre this was. There was an awkward pause after that, in the space which would normally be filled with assurances to meet up again. But then as Fitz made to leave he hesitated, touched my arm. ‘Let me know,’ he said, ‘if you do find Alex. If you go looking, that is.’
I nodded, then watched him walk away. Just as I judged he might look back I turned and went into the station.
The journey went by in a blur, the conversation with Fitz replaying itself, fragments of remembered words and phrases against a backdrop of much older memories and images, all on a loop in my head. It was only later, lying in my hotel bed, wide awake on alcohol and a burning curiosity, that I found time to examine something that was niggling me, scratching away at the back of my mind. Actually two things. One was that Fitz had been so shocked about Alex. She never got in touch? And his next words, But I thought she— As though he knew something about her that I didn’t.
Then there was all the unsaid. For example, he didn’t