You Left Early. Louisa Young

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.